Sunday, July 10, 2022

Too-Political Science

By Andrew Follett

Thursday, June 23, 2022

 

Americans don’t trust science the way they used to — because science is becoming increasingly untrustworthy.

 

In the 1970s, when Gallup asked Americans how much confidence they had in science, political-party members varied little in their responses: Republicans’ attitudes were about the same as Democrats’. But Gallup’s more recent polling shows that trust in science has deteriorated among Americans in recent decades, especially among Republicans, whose confidence was nearly 30 points lower in 2021 than in 1975. Independents have lost considerable faith in science as well, as have Americans as a whole. The only group whose trust in science has increased is Democrats.

 

Until around 2018, polling by FiveThirtyEight had found no significant partisan divide among Americans who said they had “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community. But the trust gap grew more pronounced by 2021, when 65 percent of Democrats in this group had “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared with 32 percent of Republicans.

 

Democrats like to claim they’re the “party of science,” with science presumed to be fact-based and impartial, but this partisan trust gap is evidence that science has become politicized. The politicization is a result of two phenomena: a broad replication crisis in the social sciences, and its intermixing with agenda-pushing by militant ideologues in all the sciences. Republicans and independents are right to be skeptical when scientists make broad claims for their research but can’t get consistent results, or when scientific findings are twisted or misrepresented to support the researchers’ ideological beliefs.

 

By the current norm of social sciences, to be considered significant, a finding must have a 95 percent chance of not being random. That might sound robust, but it isn’t, as there’s enormous pressure to play fast and loose with the scientific method to get the positive results that academics want. This means that an awful lot of the research getting published is flat-out false, or inconclusive at best. This problem is real, and it’s getting worse. According to a 2020 survey by DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), in 2009, 53.4 percent of social-science papers had “failed to replicate,” meaning that efforts to reproduce their results had not succeeded. By 2018, that figure had risen to 55.8 percent. Flipping a coin would give you better odds of success.

 

The problem of irreproducible results is worsened by biased experimenters who torture the evidence until it confesses whatever their ideological commitments demand. This could explain why the replication crisis is getting worse as the left-wing echo chamber of academia becomes more politically extreme and experimenters find creative new ways to spin evidence into confirming their preconceptions — for example, by running slight variations of the same experiment until the politically desirable outcome appears. 

 

The best way to show this bias at work is by looking at “placebo” scientific studies of a phenomenon that we can be fairly certain doesn’t exist, such as psychic powers. An entire field called “parapsychology” attempts to study such powers. Sadly, scientific norms are so flimsy that parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic abilities just as easily as more-conventional scientists are able to produce evidence for regular types of phenomena through sheer chance, manipulating weak statistical methods, and the bias of researchers who want to believe in the phenomenon. Researchers who believe in psychic powers find “statistically significant” evidence of them, while those who don’t believe fail to find any evidence whatsoever, even when the two researchers plan every aspect of the experiment together, work in the same lab, and have little contact with the research subject.

 

Confirmation bias (favoring results that support one’s desired result and downplaying or discarding those that don’t), lowered standards, and increasingly extreme ideology among social scientists and the political Left more broadly have combined to create a fertile environment for entire academic fields of a questionable nature. These fields, which have earned the pejorative nickname “grievance studies,” examine the world primarily in terms of “identity” and include gender studies, queer studies, whiteness studies, critical race studies, and so forth.

 

Journals in these ideologically motivated fields have been repeatedly tricked into approving satirical hoax articles with made-up citations, terrible research designs, and excessively prolix writing spattered with ridiculous postmodern newspeak. Last year, Higher Education Quarterly unwittingly published a satirical paper proclaiming that academia is actually biased in favor of conservatives. The author told National Review at the time, “We wanted to see in this case if [it] would be possible to publish a paper in an elite journal when the paper is full of blatant and clear statistical errors.” Of course it was possible. The journal Nature estimates that “hundreds of gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature.” That gibberish papers are published as truth does not mean that science is gibberish; “hundreds” is a very small proportion of the literature. But the willingness of peer reviewers and editors to air outlandish claims without subjecting them to adequate investigation suggests that such decisions are influenced by ideology, and that the more ideologically freighted a topic, the more skeptical one should be.

 

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How have standards fallen so low? When large groups of fanatics share a cultural norm of crushing dissent, they self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting ideas they dislike. This is one big problem compounding another: that researchers in all fields have a documented tendency to find evidence that aligns with their personal views and reject evidence that doesn’t (or that is disliked by whoever is providing the funds).

 

In a survey of 2,000 research psychologists, for example, over half openly admitted that they selectively report on their experimental findings to yield results favorable to their preexisting views. Another 2009 study found that 34 percent of all researchers openly self-report engaging in “questionable research practices,” including “dropping data points on a gut feeling” and “changing the design, methodology, and results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source,” whereas 72 percent of those surveyed knew of colleagues who had done so.

 

In a more darkly amusing example, the right-wing comedian Steven Crowder was able to get a satirical article accepted in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society titled “Embracing Fatness as Self-Care in the Era of Trump,” which argued that obesity was an effective method both of coping with the stress progressives felt after the 2016 election and of avoiding sexual assault. He was also invited to give a presentation on the fake study at an academic conference (which he did, to rave reviews, using a pseudonym and dressed as a woman).

 

In the field of glaciology, taxpayer dollars were spent on a peer-reviewed research paper titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” An excerpt from the abstract: “Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human–ice interactions.” The research was published in the journal Progress in Human Geography. The author, the University of Oregon professor of history and environmental studies Mark Carey, has received over $700,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

 

Hard sciences allow somewhat less scope for ideology to govern research results, but the mob mentality can still hold sway. This year, a chemistry professor reviewing candidates for tenure at the University of Washington was surprised by the portfolio submitted for professorship by an applicant who focused on “energy justice” and had received large NSF grants to study energy and indigenous communities. The physicist, Jessica Hernandez, describes herself as an “Indigenous scholar, scientist, and community advocate . . . [whose] work is grounded in her Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing”; she has published peer-reviewed papers such as “Re-centering Indigenous Knowledge in Climate Change Discourse.” When a friend shared the anecdote of the chemistry professor’s surprise on Twitter, without naming any of the parties involved, the left-wing academic community quickly tracked him down and attempted to seek retribution and damage his career.

 

When even physics departments lower standards in the name of promoting politically fashionable identity obsession — and those who express even anonymous surprise are “struggled” in quasi-Maoist fashion — the entire edifice of science is threatened. 

 

Terrifyingly, research that fails the most basic tests of science is positively cited by scientists at a roughly identical rate to more robust research that complies with higher scientific standards. Even after a scientific paper has been retracted for flaws, the vast majority of citations that it garners can still be positive. This means that even after a paper is acknowledged to be wrong, it is still widely cited as if it were correct by other scientists! As a result, there is no incentive to comply with high standards or even remove already debunked papers.

 

The public, too, will often be misled. Consider the case of a famous 2008 study by University of Nebraska researchers of conservatives’ alleged psychology. The research — rather clearly motivated by ideology, suggesting that conservatism stems from conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias” — proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers. But it had already been widely disseminated in the media and continues to be popularly cited. 

 

The progressive groupthink mentality at the root of the problem of lowered standards and questionable research is killing open inquiry on campus. Roughly 50 percent of the general public supports right-wing or conservative parties, yet only 12 percent of academics do. In some social-science fields, such as anthropology, up to 60 percent of college professors openly admit they would discriminate against conservative Evangelical job candidates. That figure is 50 percent among literature professors and 39 percent among political scientists and sociologists.

 

And academics are only slightly more tolerant of Republicans as a whole than they are of Evangelicals: Thirty percent of sociologists admitted they would discriminate against Republican job candidates, along with 15 percent of political scientists and 24 percent of philosophy professors. In reality, the discrimination is likely worse than professors are willing to admit. In 2017, a report found that 39 percent of academic departments, across all disciplines, lack even a single registered-Republican professor, with that figure rising to 60 percent for the left-leaning fields of history, journalism, and communications. Around 90 percent of U.S. universities actively restricted free speech on their campuses in 2020 or prevented scientific research in areas deemed politically unpalatable to the political Left, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The problem isn’t limited to the United States: In the U.K., over 90 percent of universities are estimated to censor free speech, according to a survey by a British magazine.

 

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Then there is the matter of money. Progressive ideologues draw on a seemingly bottomless pit of government funding. Because the government holds what amounts to a legal monopoly on student lending, it effectively controls the pocketbooks of academic institutions. And bureaucrats at the NIH, the NSF, and all the other alphabet-soup agencies prefer to fund lines of inquiry that fit into their preconceived political narratives. After an internal audit, the NSF itself estimated that this sort of research misconduct creates over $110 million in annual costs. To quote Samuel Broder, the former director of the National Cancer Institute: “If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you’d have the best iron lung in the world but not a polio vaccine.” Or to quote the late Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman: “No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated.” A healthy government would withdraw financial support from institutions that churned out biased work, instead of expanding their funding to prop up the house of cards.

 

What’s even more damaging is that the biased and faulty canon of knowledge produced by the toxic stew of radical ideological conformity, deep pockets brimming with tax dollars, and standards in freefall does not simply remain locked away in the ivory tower. The flawed research spills out into broader society by molding the thinking of university graduates and influencing momentous public-policy decisions.

 

Recently, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) retracted a highly influential paper on marine protected areas and fishing because it contained significant errors that undercut the paper’s results, as well as irregularities in the peer-review process that violated conflict-of-interest policies.

 

The paper was directly edited by Jane Lubchenco, the White House official who is currently overseeing President Biden’s Scientific Integrity Task Force. Lubchenco was responsible for overseeing the paper’s journey through the peer-review process, including the selection of reviewers. She must have knowingly violated PNAS guidelines for conflict of interest, since she was editing research authored by her brother-in-law, whose Ph.D. she had advised. This is an egregious violation of scientific integrity by the woman who is in charge of enforcing scientific integrity at the White House.

 

It gets even worse: On November 17, 2020, Lubchenco testified before the House Natural Resources Committee to support the Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act, using this specific research, to argue in favor of more environmental regulation. In defiance of congressional ethics requirements, she did not disclose that she had edited the paper or been a collaborator in the research. Forgive the pun, but that’s rather fishy.

 

The Lubchenco affair is a microcosm of the broader issue of the warping of scientific establishments into de facto left-wing public-relations firms. In the Soviet Union, scientists had Lysenkoism, a flawed but ideologically trendy biology theory applied to agriculture during the Stalin era, with deadly, famine-inducing consequences. Today America is in thrall to Lubchencoism, if you will — an early stage of the same kind of insidious subordination of scientific institutions to political interests that infamously afflicted communist countries.

 

Progressives like to say, “Trust science.” To earn back conservatives’ trust, and indeed the trust of anyone to the right of Lenin, science needs first to be made trustworthy again. And the first step is to starve the beast that is radical academia of its endless funds for ludicrous research that could pass muster only in an echo chamber.

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