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.
***
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.
***
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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