At the New Atlantis web site we have a very long essay by M. Anthony Mills on the topic of scientific consensus. The title is "Manufacturing Consensus" and the subtitle is "Science needs conformity — but not the kind it has right now." We see a picture at the top of a herd of sheep all heading in the same direction. But don't be fooled by the photo, the title and the subtitle, which are all kind of like quarterback pump fakes (when a quarterback pretends to throw in one direction, but then throws in another direction). In the essay Mills rather speaks as if he wants you to be one of the unquestioning sheep, one of the herd of meek minions who blindly believe as they are told to believe by science professors.
The purpose of Mills seems to be to encourage a credulous "believe-it-all" attitude towards science professors and their belief traditions. Mills seems to want us to trust in our science professors as much as a Soviet commissar would trust in his politburo. And just as Soviet commissars very much believed that Marxist party orthodoxy should be enforced, Mills tells us multiple times that scientist belief traditions should be enforced.
Using "false dilemma" reasoning, in which the reader is given a choice between two radically opposed alternatives that are not the only choices, Mills paints a choice between two extremes. The first extreme he describes like this:
"According to one influential view, consensus should play no role in science. This is because, so the argument goes, science is fundamentally about questioning orthodoxy and elite beliefs, basing knowledge instead on evidence that is equally available to all. At the moment when science becomes consensus, it ceases to be science."
This is a "straw man" portrayal. Critics of unjustified claims of a scientific consensus do not typically claim "consensus should play no role in science." Everyone agrees that there is a consensus about things such as the existence of cells and the high temperature of the sun, and no has a problem with there being a consensus about such well-established facts. But critics of unjustified claims of a scientific consensus may reasonably claim that (1) some of the claims made about a scientific consensus are untrue because such a consensus (defined as a unanimity of opinion) does not really exist, or (2) some of the claims made about a scientific consensus are inappropriate because the underlying belief is untrue.
After constructing and then knocking down this "straw man" of ultra-rebellious thinking in which all established facts are put in doubt, Mills proceeds to advocate what he seems to think is the proper way things should occur in the world of science. He uses a kind of reasoning very similar to some reasoning made by Catholic authorities during the Protestant Reformation, who argued that only those trained sufficiently by the Catholic Church could criticize what the Catholic Church was doing. Mills seems to advocate a world in which only those trained within science academia belief traditions can criticize the claims of such traditions. He does this by stating this:
"In order to participate in or contribute to established science — much less to criticize or overthrow it — one has to have been trained in the relevant scientific fields. That is to say, one has to have been brought up in a particular scientific tradition, whether geocentric or heliocentric astronomy, or classical or relativistic physics."
This statement is very wrong. It is not necessary for a person to have been trained and "brought up in a particular scientific tradition" in order to criticize the statements of scientists in that tradition. Any person studying by himself for a sufficient length of time can gain enough knowledge to make good and worthwhile criticisms of the statements of scientists in many scientific fields. Also, a person can contribute to science without being "brought up in a particular scientific tradition." There are many ways in which citizen scientists can and have contributed to established science.
A very important point that Mills fails to realize is that you don't need to thoroughly understand a theory in order to make solid, important rebuttals of the theory. Suppose someone hands me some bizarre 80-page document advancing some elaborate ancient astronaut theory that includes (among its many complicated claims) the claim that extraterrestrials are living in tall castles on the moon. I don't have to understand all or most of this theory to refute it. I need merely point out that astronomers have thoroughly mapped the moon, and have found no such high castles on it. Similarly, I don't need to know much about the complicated theoretical speculations of what is called cosmic inflation theory to point out that this theory of something strange happening near the first instant of the universe it not an empirically well-founded theory. I need merely learn that cosmologists say that throughout the first 200,000 years of the universe's history matter and energy were so dense that no observations from such a period will ever be possible. Armed with that one fact, I know that this cosmic inflation theory can never possibly be verified.
We then have a statement which is characterized by an overawed naivete. Mills seems to suggest that scientists receiving training should trustingly accept triumphal stories handed down by their elders, rather like Catholics reverently accepting stories of the wondrous deeds of the medieval saints. He states this:
"To be initiated into a tradition, one has to first submit to the authority of its bearers — as an apprentice does to the master craftsman — and to the institutions that sustain the tradition. In the natural sciences, the bearers of tradition are usually exemplary figures from the past, such as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, or Lavoisier, whose stories are passed down by teachers and textbooks."
This is not the way any one should study nature. We should learn about nature by studying observations, always questioning belief dogmas and whether observational claims are robust, always asking whether some claim about nature is a belief mandated by facts and observations, or merely some speech custom or belief tradition of overconfident authorities. Sacred lore and kneeling to tradition may have its place in religion, but has no proper place in the world of science. Whenever scientists are taught through a kind of process in which "stories are passed down" like sacred lore, and revered "not-to-be-questioned" scientists are put on pedestals, it is a sign that scientific academia has gone off track.
We may wonder whether the visual below might be a good representation of the ideas of Mills on how scientists should be trained:
Very confusingly defined in multiple ways, "consensus" is a word that some leading dictionaries define as an agreed opinion among a group of people. The first definition of "consensus" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "general agreement: unanimity." Mills fails to see that some of the most important claimed examples of scientific consensus are cases where we do not have good evidence that there actually is a consensus (defined as a unanimous opinion). The only way to reliably tell whether a consensus exists among scientists is to do a secret ballot vote. Such votes are not done of scientists. So, for example, we do not know whether even 90% of scientists believe in Darwinism or in claims that minds come mainly from the brain.
But there are quite a few of what we may call cases of a socially enforced reputed consensus. That is where there is a general idea that there is an expectation that a scientist is supposed to support some idea (or at least not contradict it), or else he is going to be in career trouble. Mills seems to give his approval of the idea of a socially enforced consensus. First he states, "This is why consensus is so vital to science — and why the institutions of science not only can and do but should use their authority to enforce it." This is only one of 21 times Mills uses the word "authority" in his essay.
The idea of an enforced consensus is self-contradictory. According to the Merriam-Webster definition, "consensus" means agreement or unanimity. When people agree on something, there is no need to enforce opinions. The instant someone talks about enforcing a consensus, it is an indication that no real consensus exists.
Mills then gives us a rather long description of a scientific consensus as an excuse for placing questions "out of bounds" and for "gatekeeping" in which there is a kind of protected country club in which hated opposing observations and arguments are kept out, like black applicants to 1950's country clubs. Mills approvingly cites the tendency of modern scientists to ignore a host of arguments and observations that conflict with their belief dogmas. Such behavior, so unworthy of a first-class scientist or first-class scholar, is an appalling tendency to fail to study observational reports that conflict with your beliefs and are evidence against some thing you claim is true. Referring to the literature of critics and contrarians as "venues," he writes this:
"What is striking, however, is that the arguments presented in these venues are almost never refuted by mainstream scientists. They may be publicly denounced, but without elaborate argumentation in professional journals. Most of the time, they are simply ignored....Science could never advance if it had to re-establish every past theory, counter every objection, or refute every crank."
The term "crank" is a term that merely means someone who irritates you. The reasoning that scientists should be excused from countering objections to their theories because they don't have time to do that is one of the silliest arguments made by scientists too lazy to respond to objections to their theories, and is here repeated by Mills. Scientists nowadays waste enormous amounts of time and federal dollars cranking out poorly reproducible results and poorly designed experiments described in papers that typically get almost no readership, with a large fraction of the papers being highly speculative or mostly unintelligible or devoted to topics so specialized and obscure that they are of no real value. The idea that scientists are too busy to respond to arguments and evidence against their theories is absurd. Were scientists to stop wasting so much time, they would have plenty of time to respond to arguments and evidence against their theories.
There then follows a bad argument by Mills that we must accept the teachings of scientists all over the place because we are "dependent" on such teachings. It involves another silly argument about time, an argument that kind of seems to say that we can't challenge any dogmas of scientists because we don't have time to study up on the relevant topics. That isn't true at all. For example, anyone can read up on a Saturday on the very slight reasoning Darwin used to advance his very simple theory of so-called "natural selection," and anyone can read up on a Sunday on some powerful reasons for rejecting such claims.
Scientific theories can be cast into doubt or effectively refuted by someone who has not spent terribly much time studying such theories. I will give one of hundreds of possible examples. Consider the case of out-of-body experiences, which are very widely reported by humans. Prevailing neuroscientist theory holds that the mind is purely the product of the brain, and prevailing evolutionary theory holds that the collective reality of human minds is purely the product of some brain-related random mutations in the past. But suppose a scholar collects many reliable accounts of people who report traveling out of their bodies and observing them from above; and suppose he finds that in many of these cases the person had no appreciable brain activity; and suppose he gathers evidence that quite a few of these people discovered things that should have been impossible for them to know if such experiences were mere hallucinations. Now we have evidence that would seem to cast very great doubt on two major scientific theories: both the theory that mind is purely the product of the brain, and the theory holding that the mentality of the human species is purely the product of some brain-related random mutations in the past. To produce such evidence, it was not even necessary to study closely the theories cast into doubt by the evidence. I could give countless other examples of how independent research by non-scientists can cast doubt on the claims of hallowed scientific theories, without requiring great study of the intricacies of such theories by the non-scientists. Such examples help show that we are not at all "dependents" who must meekly accept scientific theories we have not become experts on, like little children forced to believe whatever their parents tell them.
Later Mills mentions "the modern evolutionary synthesis" (in other words, Neo-Darwinism), making the very dubious claim that it is a "consensus." He is apparently unaware that there is a large respectable scholarly body of literature opposing Neo-Darwinism, and that nearly a thousand scientists have signed their names indicating their agreement to the following statement:
"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
Any secret ballot of scientists would show that a significant fraction do not believe or doubt Darwinism. I doubt Mills realizes that a claim of a consensus is a powerful rhetorical weapon, and that long before there is anything like a consensus, believers in some scientific idea may start claiming all over the place that there is a consensus in support of an idea. This is a powerful form of psychological intimidation, a sneaky way by which bad ideas can start to go viral and rise to the top. Advocates of some theory will claim that all or almost all of the smart people are moving or have moved to embrace the theory, although that may not at all be true. The "everybody moving in one direction" impression may largely be an illusion fostered by those who know the persuasion power of portraying some consensus that does not yet exist. "Bandwagon and herd-effect your way to the top" has been the secret by which many a bad theory becomes dominant.
Mills cites "the modern evolutionary synthesis" as an example of something "that scientific institutions can and should enforce." Here he sounds like some Soviet commissar telling us that Marxist dogma must be enforced. The commissars believed it was right for Marxist dogma to be enforced, because they regarded it as a form of science, what they called "economic science" or "scientific communism."
Towards the end, Mills mentions how scientists were wrong in stating in 2020 claims that there was a consensus that COVID-19 had purely natural origins. But he seems to have learned no sound lesson from such a failure, and seems to mention this failure just as a lure to attract readers interested in hearing someone with ideas different from his own, like someone using cheese in a mouse trap.
The end of the claim that there was a scientific consensus on COVID-19 origins came about largely because of the work of non-scientists such as journalists and people in non-scientific fields (such as Jamie Metzl) who kept writing articles giving us facts opposing such a consensus. Here we have an important reality contrary to what Mills has suggested, that science matters should be left to the scientists because they are too complicated for people to understand, a claim Mills made about the time he said this: "In order to participate in or contribute to established science — much less to criticize or overthrow it — one has to have been trained in the relevant scientific fields." Mills has failed to draw the right lesson from what happened here: that non-scientists may have something very valuable to contribute to scientific debates. The "leave science to the scientists" thinking that Mills seems to advocate makes no more sense than "leave war to the generals."
Mills tries to portray the year 2020 inaccurate claims of a COVID-19 origins consensus as some freak aberration. But there was nothing very out-of-the-ordinary about such a thing. It was just another example of the very long-standing tendency of many science professors to jump to conclusions, to claim to know things that they do not actually know, to avoid studying evidence that conflicts with the conclusions they have reached, to claim they understand the origin of something before achieving almost any of the prerequisites needed before credibly making such a claim, to meekly bow to the authority of their peers or predecessors, and to unfairly characterize reasonable critics as unreasonable extremists. To see a table listing many parallels between COVID-19 origins groupthink and human origins groupthink, see this post.
In the last paragraph, Mills returns to his ideas seeming to recommend that we should be ruled by the belief traditions of professors, telling us that "science’s integrity must be protected by enforcing consensus." When people say such things, they are using the secondary definition of "integrity," which is "the state of being whole and undivided." Similarly, medieval authorities argued that "the integrity of the Church must be protected" when trying to justify abominations such as the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. The idea that a consensus should be enforced is a medieval-sounding and Soviet-sounding idea that has no place in properly functioning science. Science by itself is a morally neutral activity with no intrinsic moral component, and in the past hundred years many scientists in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, imperial Japan and also the United States had a long history of entanglement (direct or indirect) with brutality and oppression, often funded by governments. So you may find Mills saying that Darwinism needs to be enforced almost as scary as Mike Flynn saying that America should have only one religion.
Mills would do well to study the chart below, and to ask himself whether he is encouraging some of the dysfunctional items on the right end, while discouraging some of the good things on the left end.
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