When newly awarded
PhD's start writing papers and books and judging truth, they are
rather like jurors who have been methodically exposed to evidence,
and who then deliver a verdict that is a judgment of truth. A
community of scientific experts may have much more prestige than a
group of ordinary people chosen for a jury. But there are some
reasons for thinking that the 12 ordinary people on a jury may be
more likely to judge truth correctly than a clannish scientific
community with some narrow subject specialty. Below are some of the
reasons.
Reason
#1: Jury Members are Randomly Selected, but Scientific Experts are
Often Those Who Volunteered to Join an Ideological Enclave
One of the greatest
strengths of the jury system is that jury members are randomly
selected. A system in which jurors can volunteer for particular
trials would not work well at all. If a particular defendant was on
trial for murder, and jurors could volunteer for a particular case,
then you might end up with only jurors predisposed to find that the
defendant was guilty. Instead the jury system guarantees randomness.
Jurors are randomly selected from the population. When they go to the
court, they are randomly assigned to trials. So we usually don't end
up with things like juries consisting mostly of people who were
inclined to judge one particular way when judging a court case.
But this random
selection process differs greatly from how scientific experts become
scientific experts. A scientific expert becomes a PhD by
volunteering for some particular graduate program at a university.
These graduate programs are often ideological enclaves, places where
there predominates some particular ideology not embraced by most
people.
The fact that the
graduates of such programs are volunteers creates the opportunity for
sociological selection effects. Let's imagine an extreme example. Let's
imagine there arises some new scientific discipline called
groosology. It might be the opinion of 90% of the American
population that groosology is utter nonsense. But groosology might be
“all the rage” at some Graduate Program in Groosology Studies at
a particular university. The people who sign up for such a program
might almost all be from the tiny fraction of the population that
believes in groosology. At this particular program there might then
be tremendous sociological pressure for students to embrace
groosology. So 90% of the graduates of this graduate
program might be believers in groosology, even though a randomly selected jury from the general population would probably conclude groosology is worthless nonsense.
The diagram below
illustrates this type of sociological effect. Such a sociological
effect is going on at many graduate programs at universities, which
are often as much ideological enclaves as are theology schools.
There is the
additional fact that university graduate schools are not free, but
often charge very high tuition fees, such as $30,000 a year. The
number of scholarships for graduate programs is only a small fraction
of the scholarships for bachelor's degree programs. Such facts tend
to guarantee that the people who sign up for university graduate
programs are not merely people predisposed to accept the ideology of
such programs, but are actually people particularly eager to accept
such an ideology. For example, you are not likely to shell out
$50,000 to be trained as an evolutionary biologist unless you were
really enthusiastic about the prevailing thinking of evolutionary
biologists to begin with.
An equivalent
situation in a jury pool would be if courts charged a high fee (such
as $5000) for you to be a voluntary juror on a particular defendant's
jury. This would guarantee that the juries would be populated only
by those who were the most passionate about the defendant's guilt or
innocence.
Reason
#2: Juries Are Exposed to an Even-handed Discussion by People Arguing
Opposing Cases, but Scientists Are Not Trained in Such a Way
One of the great
strengths of the jury system and the court system is that equal
weight is given to opposing sides. Imagine if someone is being tried
for murder. First, the district attorney will give an introductory
speech making the case for the defendant's guilt. Then the
defendant's attorney will make a speech arguing for the defendant's
innocence. Then the district attorney will present witnesses and
evidence trying to establish the defendant's guilt, which at each
stage may be challenged or cross-examined by the defense attorney.
Then the defense attorney will present witnesses and evidence trying
to establish the defendant's innocence, which at each stage may be
challenged or cross-examined by the district attorney. Finally the
district attorney will summarize the case for the defendant's guilt,
and the defense attorney will summarize the case for the defendant's
innocence. What could be more even-handed?
But unlike a juror
who is exposed to both sides of the case with a fair balance, a
student studying at a scientific graduate school gets no such
even-handed exposure to opposing opinions and differing evidence.
Such a student will be likely to be indoctrinated in only side of the
case. For example, if you are studying to be a neuroscientist, you
will get years of indoctrination that will give you one side of the
story: the idea that mental processes are purely the products of
brains, and cannot occur once a brain is dead. There will certainly
not be a point in your training where your program director will say,
“Very well, to give you an evenhanded education, you will now spend
the next six months talking to psychics, those who had near-death
experiences, and mediums who claim to be able to contact the dead
through seances.” (Graduate schools may have courses on the
thinking of those opposed to the viewpoints taught by the graduate
schools, but such courses are normally taught by teachers hostile to
such thinking, and simply amount to an attempt to immunize the
student against such thinking.)
How would it be if
juries had such experiences? We might imagine a jury that would hear
only the prosecuting attorney's case, without ever hearing the
defense attorney's case (or a jury which heard only the defense
attorney's case, without ever hearing the prosecuting attorney's
case).
Reason
# 3: Juries Are Not Socially Pressured to Have Particular Opinions
While They Are Being Exposed to the Evidence
If you are a juror,
you are not socially pressured to have a particular opinion until you
get into the jury room to reach your verdict. Jurors are silent while
a trial is proceeding, and jurors are instructed not to talk about a
case during a trial, until the final jury discussion after the evidence has been presented. So there is no peer pressure for you to think in
a particular way until the very end of the process, nor is there any
authority figure asking you about whether you have conformed to the
expected thinking.
But it is a very
different situation for the student training in a scientific graduate
program. The student will be constantly asked to take tests and write
essays, and he may be graded partially according to whether he
accepts whatever ideology he is being taught. For example, someone
training to be a neuroscientist may be asked to explain how memory
works, and he may be graded by how well he parrots prevailing
theories, and may be graded poorly if he suggests such theories are
unbelievable. Having made a huge investment in tuition, the student
is almost forced to “deliver his verdict” on the truth of what he
is being taught before his training has finished; or he may risk
flunking his courses and losing his huge tuition investment.
Reason
# 4: Juries Have No Financial Interest in Reaching a Particular
Verdict
If you are a juror
and get into the jury room, you will have no vested interest or
financial interest in reaching a particular verdict. You can then
reach an opinion solely on the facts, knowing that it will make no
difference to your financial health.
But we may contrast
this with the person who has just graduated from a university
graduate school. His financial health will now depend on conforming
to whatever ideology was taught at his graduate school. If he speaks
as if he accepted the prevailing ideas in his little science
community, he will have a decent chance of getting research grants,
and might even be appointed to be a professor (a decision that will
be made by professors who have embraced the ideology of his
scientific community). But imagine if this person announces a
contrarian verdict. Imagine if he states that he disagrees with the
conclusions of his scientific community. Such a person will have
placed himself “out on a limb,” and his position will be
financially precarious. He will have a hard time getting scientific journals to publish
his scientific papers, since peer reviewers often exclude papers
suggesting results contrary to the ideological taboos and norms of a
scientific community. Lacking much of a publication record, and out
of sync with the thought of those who decide whether he should be
appointed as a professor, he won't be able to get appointed as a
professor.
So many of our newly minted
PhD's are like bribed jurors. They have a strong financial incentive
to reach particular conclusions. If something similar were to go on
with juries, we might imagine a situation like this. Near the end of
the trial, when you went into the jury room to reach the verdict, you
would find various pitch men who would tell you that if you voted in
one particular way, you would be paid $10,000.
If
Being a Juror Was Like Becoming a Conformist Scientist
I can put all these
observations together into a portrait of what it would be like if
being a juror was like studying to become a scientist at certain types of graduate programs. Things would
work like this. The only way in which you would become a juror would
be if you paid a big fat fee to sit on a particular jury –
something like $20,000 or $40,000. Once you got on that jury you
would find yourself with other jurors who had all volunteered for the
particular case you were to judge on, jurors who had all paid large
sums to sit on the jury. During the trial you would only be
presented with one side of the case, the case of the prosecuting
district attorney. During the trial breaks, you would have authority
figures come to see you and your fellow jurors. They would ask you
questions to make sure that you were absorbing and accepting the
government's case, and they would try to squash any skepticism you
might have about that case. Once the case had been presented, you and
your fellow jurors would finally find yourself in the jury room,
assigned to the task of reaching the verdict. But before you started,
you would talk with various people who would offer you huge bribes to
vote as the prosecuting district attorney wanted you to vote. You
would know that rejecting authority and thinking independently would
be very financially disadvantageous.
In the description
above, the giant fee required for sitting on a particular jury
corresponds to the tuition price of getting a graduate degree. The
situation of hearing only one side of the case corresponds to the
fact that you are pretty much taught only one standpoint if you sign up to get a
degree in something like Freudian psychoanalysis, string theory, evolutionary biology or neuroscience. The
part about trial breaks corresponds to the fact that graduate
students are constantly monitored and graded in accordance with how well
they are absorbing their indoctrination without resisting it. The
part about the bribes in the jury room corresponds to the fact that
any newly minted PhD knows that he will flourish financially by
singing from the same hymn book as the other scientists in his
specialty, rather than going out on a limb and judging that such
scientists have come to wrong conclusions.
We don't have such a
jury system like the one described above. We have instead a totally
different system designed to maximize the chance the jurors will
reach impartial decisions after hearing both sides. The common person
who takes part in such a system – sometimes a low-paid cleaner,
driver, or cashier – does not have the prestige of a scientist. But
due to the strengths of the jury system, such a person may be more
likely to judge truth correctly and objectively than some person with
a fancy title who may be the assembly-line end-product of the
mind-molding conformist machinery of an ideological enclave.
How
to Run a School That Churns Out Standardized Thought-Robots
From the
sociological considerations above, we can deduce some general tips
that can be used by any person wishing to create an ideological
enclave that will generate graduates that all share the same
ideology.
- Make it perfectly clear that your institution will be teaching a particular ideology (but avoid using that particular word).
- Charge a very hefty annual tuition, making sure that the only people who sign up for the school are people strongly predisposed to believe in whatever ideology you will be teaching.
- Give your students a one-sided curriculum that indoctrinates them in your ideology, with little or no exposure to alternate viewpoints.
- Require that your students repeatedly voice assent to your ideology as you are teaching it, by doing things such as having tests in which the correct answers are those reflecting your ideology, and written essays that will be graded poorly if they do not reflect your ideology.
- Flunk out students who show signs of rebelling against your ideology, or simply leave them in some “uncompleted curriculum” limbo that causes them to quit.
- During the months leading up to graduation, make it perfectly clear that your graduates will enjoy a lucrative career in your organization and similar organizations if they continue to voice the ideology that the school has taught, but that they will receive no financial reward at all for their huge tuition investment if they defy that ideology.
This should work
like a charm, and 90% of your graduates will probably end up voicing
approval for whatever strange ideology you have taught them. Sadly
the description above doesn't differ very much from how certain types
of scientific specialists are trained.
Postscript: My previous post The Groupthink Problem in Modern Cosmology and Physics discusses complacent conformity problems in two branches of science. In my post Improving the Conformity Factories Known as Science Graduate Schools I give some ideas on how to lessen some of the "rubberstamp thinking" problems mentioned in this post. Besides the ideas discussed in that post, I can think of an additional way to reduce the problem: fund scholarship programs that offer "take it or leave it" full-tuition scholarships to randomly selected college seniors, offering to pay the entire cast of graduate education in one particular scientific area, without any option to change the field of study. For example, a randomly selected English major might suddenly receive an offer to pay the full cost of becoming a PhD in neuroscience, with no option to change to some other PhD program. With such a program, you would have a higher percentage of graduate school beginners who were not predisposed to accept the ideology of a particular graduate program. An additional idea is to set up a large prize fund consisting of many individual financial awards to be awarded only to scientists who publish results that contradict prevailing assumptions in their field. A good name for such a fund would be: the "Shock to the System" awards.
Postscript: My previous post The Groupthink Problem in Modern Cosmology and Physics discusses complacent conformity problems in two branches of science. In my post Improving the Conformity Factories Known as Science Graduate Schools I give some ideas on how to lessen some of the "rubberstamp thinking" problems mentioned in this post. Besides the ideas discussed in that post, I can think of an additional way to reduce the problem: fund scholarship programs that offer "take it or leave it" full-tuition scholarships to randomly selected college seniors, offering to pay the entire cast of graduate education in one particular scientific area, without any option to change the field of study. For example, a randomly selected English major might suddenly receive an offer to pay the full cost of becoming a PhD in neuroscience, with no option to change to some other PhD program. With such a program, you would have a higher percentage of graduate school beginners who were not predisposed to accept the ideology of a particular graduate program. An additional idea is to set up a large prize fund consisting of many individual financial awards to be awarded only to scientists who publish results that contradict prevailing assumptions in their field. A good name for such a fund would be: the "Shock to the System" awards.
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