Be In No Hurry to Trust Financially Motivated Theorists

When you read my writings on this blog or my two other blogs (here and here), you are always reading material untainted by financial motivations.  Since I started blogging quite a few years ago, I have never made any net earnings from my literary or photographic activities.  During that time I made a very small number of dollars from books I have for sale on www.amazon.com, but such paltry income has come nowhere close to matching the expenses I pay to cover my photography blog.  That blog has required thousands of dollars of expenses, because I make heavy daily use of expensive Sony cameras that work very well but tend to stop working about every six months or so.  The only books of mine now listed on my home page www.markmahin.com are books you can read online for free, because I have uploaded them to www.archive.org.  Content of all of my blogs can be republished without paying me anything, as all of my blogs are under a Creative Commons license described on the home page of each blog. I do not have any ads on any of my sites, and have never received a penny from anyone paying to support such sites. 

But when we read in books statements by theorists, we often are reading statements tainted by financial motivations.  A theorist writing a book may often be thinking: "How can I write this in a way that will sell well?" When he writes his paragraphs and selects his book title, he may be asking himself, "How can I do this in a way that will get me lots of money?"

Scientific activity is often described by scientists as a kind of unsullied and pristine Quest for Truth carried out by impartial judges of reality. But scientific activity is often largely something much less pure and grand, such as:

• A Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts: Scientists strive to get a high number of papers published, and a high number of citations for papers they write. Such citation counts are used as a performance metric. So a scientist may give a paper some title that is not justified by what is in the paper, hoping that this may result in a higher citation count for the paper.
• A Quest for Grant Money. Unless he has grant money, a scientist may have no funds to fund experimental activities. So a scientist may start claiming it is really important to do some type of experiment, to get the funds to keep him busy, perhaps even if such experiments aren't proving fruitful.  
• A Quest for Tenure. A scientist may be eager to line up the lifetime job of being a tenured professor. He may say and do things largely because he thinks such speech and behavior will advance this goal.
• A Quest for Consulting Fees or Speaking Fees.  Many a scientist makes money on the side by getting consulting fees from private corporations, or by getting speaking fees for speechs often held in corporate settings.  A scientist may say whatever will tend to maximize such fees.  For example, a neuroscientist may package some dubious claims into a  "How to Maximize the Brain Performance of Your Staff" presentation that can be delivered in exclusive talks commanding a high speaking fee. 
• A Quest for Corporate or Millionaire Funds.  Corporations and millionaires have "deep pockets" filled with tons of money, and they are not shy about throwing money towards scientists, particularly those willing to write something that favors the bottom line or private passions of the corporations or millionaires (who may sometimes be billionaires). Often such funds flow indirectly, with a scientist getting money for writing or speaking through some media source or commission or committee or council that is largely funded by corporate or millionaire donations. 
• A Quest for Book Contracts.  If a scientist has some provocative and interesting theory, he may be able to parlay such speculation into a lucrative book contract received from a major publisher. 

We should always be wary of a theorist who is presenting a theory mainly through a book for sale. When a scientist does such a thing, he is no longer acting like an impartial judge of truth. He is in a situation where he has a strong financial motive to speak in an overconfident manner, and "pull out all the stops" to sell some particular theory, for the sake of making more money from the sales of his book. "This is just how it is" books sell better than "maybe it's kind of like this" books and "we don't really understand such things" books.  And so we have theorists who write science-related books with overconfident know-it-all titles such as "Who We Are and How We Got Here," titles which make the authors sound like they understand deep mysteries that are far, far beyond the understanding of any human.  

Below are some examples of theorists who had strong financial motivations to make overconfident presentations of dubious theories:

• Erich von Daniken:  Starting with his book "Chariots of the Gods?"  von Daniken's "ancient astronauts" theory has been a financial windfall for von Daniken. He has made a ton of money from a series of books, and the ancient astronauts theory has become a kind of cottage industry, morphing into the long-running TV series Ancient Aliens.  On that show we can sometimes hear von Daniken using some dubious reasoning, such as speaking as if something written in the ancient theological Book of Enoch should be taken as a serious record of what happened ages ago. 
• Charles Darwin.  Darwin is often mistaken as some impartial judge of truth, but he was not.  Darwin presented his theories in commercial books for sale, and made a lot of money from the royalties he received from such books.  
• Richard Dawkins. As some of his books have ridiculously impartial titles targeted to appeal to atheists, no one should mistake this author as being anything like an impartial judge of truth. Dawkins books give us an example of the lucrative publishing practice of niche-marketing.  
• Stephen Hawking. The late Stephen Hawking's books were a gigantic money machine, but their content was often groundless speculation sold as science. In one book he pitched the very dubious speculative contraption that is M-theory as if it were some great breakthrough. Mathematics authority Peter Woit says this about the many books that came out under Hawking's name after A Brief History of Time:  "The problem is that, on the whole, they’re not any good, and they’re not written by Hawking." He suggests there was quite a bit of ghost-writing going on behind his books. 
• Carl Sagan. Between 1960 and 1995 the late astronomer Sagan made a bundle on books selling a quirky creed including ideas such as the claim that our galaxy has a million or more  species of intelligent beings, none of whom look like humans, and none of which has recently visited Earth.  A fact check on his claims turns up quite a few cases of unwarranted and inaccurate statements, and radio searches for extraterrestrials have come up empty (contrary to Sagan's frequent insinuations they would soon provide a great bonanza for mankind).  Oddly, Sagan repeatedly blasted fellow author von Daniken for his claims about ancient astronauts, even though Sagan had presented a very similar theory in writing before von Daniken. 
• Steven Pinker. Psychologist Pinker writes books often peddling very dubious theories, and his 2018 book had some large  errors of fact and logic;  but he tries to load his book titles with various high-sounding terms such as "enlightenment," "reason," "rationality," "progress," and "science." One of his book titles makes the strange claim that rationality "seems scarce," which is an example of the kind of arrogant snob-speak in which  swollen heads of the ivory towers haughtily insinuate that the majority  of humans are irrational (contrary to the observational fact that the vast majority of human behavior is rational). 
• Brian Greene. Inexplicably, PBS funds were used for a 3-part NOVA TV presentation of Greene's book The Elegant Universe devoted to selling the purely speculative "white elephant"  that is string theory, what seems like a modern type of gobbledygook infested by buckets of guesswork jargon.  
• Michio Kaku: You may read here about some of the overconfident statements of string theory physicist Kaku, which include a silly recent boast about "an equation that's maybe 1 inch long" that "explains the entire universe." 

The latest example of a scientist vigorously  hawking a dubious theory for profit is Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor who has a recent book claiming that some barely visible blip distantly seen in telescopes is an extraterrestrial spaceship. Does Loeb really believe this theory? It's hard to tell, because he's making lots of money from his book selling the theory, and has every financial motivation to sound like he's convinced of the truth of his theory. 

Rather hilariously, Loeb has recently seemed to insinuate he is like some kind of Galileo persecuted by an intolerant scientific tribal orthodoxy. He has written an article in Scientific American entitled "When Scientific Orthodoxy Resembles Religious Dogma," which features a painting of the trial of Galileo, along with complaints that fellow scientists haven't shown enough love for Loeb's new book.  There are indeed intolerant tribal orthodoxies in science that cling to ideas that are like religious dogma.  But Loeb has not really suffered from any heresy-shaming.  There was no intolerant orthodoxy claiming that spaceships cannot come into the solar system.  The idea of a spaceship coming into the solar system does not clash with the two main scientist orthodoxies resembling religious dogmas (the claim that Darwin explained the origin of species, and the claim that human mental phenomena all comes from brains).  The scientists dismissing Loeb's claim were mainly those who would have loved for it to be true. Loeb's claims have been dismissed because he never presented any very convincing evidence for them. 

As a Harvard professor, Loeb is very much a privileged member of an exclusive clique, enjoying very rare advantages such as book deals involving large publicity budgets and  the ability to get your very personal "not-enough book fame" gripes published in largely read web sites such as Scientific American. His latest Sci-Am article is kind of like a member of a country club whining because he only got an exclusive parking space in the "Members Only" parking lot, but didn't get the best parking spot.  

Because a writer motivated to sell more books may overstate his case and cherry-pick facts to support his thesis (ignoring or not fairly treating realities conflicting with his theories), financial motivations are a source of bias in scientific literature.  Scientists have some techniques for reducing bias in their literary outputs. One of the main such techniques is to rigorously follow a blinding protocol in both the collection and analysis of data (so that a scientist getting data on a subject or analyzing data on the subject does not know whether the subject is or is not in a control group without some particular characteristic being investigated).  

But it is a gigantic scandal of modern experimental biology that effective blinding protocols are infrequently used in experiments.  A scientific paper states, "Using text mining and a literature review, we find evidence that blind protocols are uncommon in the life sciences and that nonblind studies tend to report higher effect sizes and more significant p-values."  The paper states, "For example, across 960 empirical studies in five animal behavior journals, 6.3% of the sampled studies were conducted blind." One of the techniques I use to quality-check experimental neuroscience studies is to do a simple text search for the word "blind" in the full text of the paper,  and I usually find a paper failed to use such a word, indicating no effort was made at following a blinding protocol.  We would be outraged by similar professional incompetence in other fields, and would be angry if we found that only 6% of doctors put on gloves before surgery  (thankfully doctors don't act so carelessly). 

One of the reasons experimental biologists so infrequently use blinding protocols is that when they are used an experimenter will be more likely to find a null result, making the experiment less likely to get published (journals favor positive results over null results). Following proper experimental techniques loses out for the sake of the Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts.

Funny thing about that Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts: it's leading to a plethora of junk science and a mountain of baloney misstatements about science research, a situation in which a paper is many times more likely to be cited if the study could not be replicated. We read in a recent news story that a study will be 153 times more likely to be cited if the research could not be replicated. 

Postscript: You've got to hand it to Avi Loeb: the guy knows how to generate publicity (although sometimes in a "jump the shark" kind of way).  His latest Scientific American post is urging that we need to establish a treaty with alleged extraterrestrial neighbors so that they don't destroy us in some "domain wall" way that no one has ever imagined before.  It's kind of like urging an international treaty to prohibit radioactive vampire zombies.