Big Science, the Enemy of Great Science

It is generally accepted that science is in a bad way, as Richard Horton wrote in his capacity as editor in chief of The Lancet. “Science has taken a turn towards darkness”, he lamented, citing small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends. A revival of Karl Popper’s ideas would help.  Chris Uhlman pointed out in The Weekend Australian June 1  that Popper changed the game of science to demand rigorous testing, rather than accumulating data and building models to support your position.

Popper’s ideas did not get far in the academic community. While rivals who  fled Austria for the US to escape Hitler attained and occupied prestigious chairs, he found a roost in far off Christchurch , where he wrote the 700-page The Open Society and Its Enemies while sixteen of his relatives went up in smoke back home.

The philosophical diaspora in the US converted the philosophy of science into a wasteland of sterile probability theory instead of an introduction to the kind of imaginative and critical thinking that drives science at its best. I think of them as “Hitler’s revenge”. Leading scientists including the Nobel Laureates Einstein, Medawar, Eccle and Monod saluted Popper’s ideas but the academic philosophers did not.

His book on political philosophy did not fare any better because he antagonized conservatives with criticism of Plato and he was put on the banned list by the Left because, an equal opportunity offender, he also did a number on Marx.

The philosophy of science was invaded by weeds, starting with Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory and then more exotic species when post-modernism became fashionable. With Popper dismissed, “consensus science” became accepted as “normal” under the influence of Kuhn’s 1962 blockbuster The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

(A historical note; in 1945 Professor Anderson invited Popper to move from Christchurch to Sydney but with help from Hayek he went to London instead. Later Anderson turned against Popper, as did his student, David Stove, who practically made a career out of sledging Popper. The otherwise admirable Clive James turned on Popper with a waspish and small-minded dismissal of The Open Society and Its Enemies, “boring and repetitive.”_

Many critics of Popper’s views on testing claim that he didn’t know enough about the history of science and he naively ignored the way that falsification is resisted by people who are determined to protect their preferred paradigms. In fact Popper was onto this from the beginning, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published in German in 1935. Observing the rearguard action by Newtonians resisting Einstein’s innovation he itemised four “conventionalist stratagems” to “immunize” their position against criticism. These are (1) ad hoc or “off the cuff” explanations of apparently adverse observations, (2) changing the definition of terms in the system, (3) questioning the results and (4) casting doubt on the acumen of the critic.

In due course, climate alarmists adopted these tactics. Did they read Popper and get the wrong message? First they shifted from “global warming” to “climate change” after a spike caused by a big El Nino in 1998. When all the dire events that were predicted did not materialize — snow will become “a thing of the past”, no more polar bears, no more beaches — the climate caravan moved on to embrace the term “extreme weather”, which turns out to be no better or worse than  at any other time since records have been collected. As for casting doubt on the acumen of critics, nowadays they are simply cancelled by the people who control grants, appointments and publishing.

At a conference in 1965 Thomas Kuhn famously confronted Popper with a challenge to join him in addressing the sociological/psychological aspects of scientific progress. Popper briskly rejected the invitation and, regrettably, missed the opportunity to remind the audience of his own institutional approach to science, which he sketched in 1945 in a paper that was reprinted in The Poverty of Historicism (1957.)

In the 1950s Popper was horrified by the growing role of government in science, inspired by the example of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. He feared for the future of Great Science as a result of Big Science in the service of politicians. He saw the danger of too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and politically “hot” topics.

All of that came about, especially in climate science, when the Clinton/Gore administration presided over a sixteen-fold increase of funding. The tsunami of funds washed all the way to the shores of the social sciences and the humanities to fund work that has nothing to do with science, carried out by people who knew nothing about science and cared less.

Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) met Popper at a conference in the early 1950s. He was captivated by Popper’s institutional approach, his own forte as a political economist, and he set aside the work that eventually became The Politics of Bureaucracy to write The Organization of Enquiry (1965.) He described what might happen through a particular combination of personal and situational circumstances, starting with the difference between scientists motivated by genuine and serious  curiosity and others with “induced curiosity.”

Devoted researchers are motivated by intense, often obsessive curiosity, to seek the truth, unlike scientists who work nine-to-five as skilled technicians. The latters’ curiosity is not intrinsic; rather, it is induced by the terms of employment, to publish papers and maintain a flow of government grants. Publish or perish, as they say. He sketched a self-perpetuating process which could drive a field of research to produce “superficially impressive but actually easy research projects” which do not advance understanding. Here think of the model-building projects in climate science and other fields.

The peer-review process is intended to avert such a decline, but Tullock foresaw its corruption by reviewers associated with the authors, either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He speculated that this would almost certainly happen in a field dominated by “induced” researchers with political agendas. At the end of the slippery slope there is a widespread acceptance of the need to support the “right side” on the issues of the day because the principal criterion in judging material for publication will be the position that the work supports. Tullock wrote:

The concern with reality that unites the sciences may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia.

Prescient words, published in 1965 when he thought that natural sciences were in good shape, unlike parts of economics which informed his pessimistic scenario.

Reviving Popper’s ideas in university courses and high schools could have a seismic impact, but the immediate prospect is dismal. Fortunately there is a weapon at hand to pursue the the same result, starting at the bottom with working scientists, rather than at the top in the philosophy of science. It is a book by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C Green, The Scientific Method,: A Guide to finding Useful Knowledge, which was reviewed in Quadrant‘s May 2023 edition

The authors begin with a survey of the problems currently afflicting science at present and they end with practical suggestions for improvement that can be taken up by the range of stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. There are chapters on assessing the quality of scientific practice, the problem of advocacy, concerns with the effectiveness of peer review and the complications that arise with government funding. The positive suggestions are offered to university managers, journal editors, governments, courts, the media, and interested individuals.