Science Is Ready for Reform

And Stuart Ritchie's stupid book is not the right way to do it.

'Science Fictions' by Stuart Ritchie is a stupid, confused book, polluted with ideology.

The best parts of the book are the descriptions of abject & massive fraud in science. That is, despite the enormous increase in administrative expenses that leech the blood of the faculty (like me), the institutions of science do a poor job of safeguarding against the perverse incentives they've created.

The worst parts of the book are author Ritchie's uncritical acceptance of vaccines & climate science, despite the self-professed necessity of skepticism and scrutiny for such contentious topics of investigation. This is worse than hypocrisy. Ritchie weaponizes the sensational cases of fraud to smear scientific critiques of vaccine & climate studies, de-legitimizing the counter arguments he doesn't bother to summarize. It is an anti-science ideology masquerading as a defense of science. Ritchie would seek to boost the reputation of The Science only so far as it serves his own sociopolitical agenda, and that is antithetical to the principles of science as even he describes them.

Although Ritchie was writing during the COVID lockdowns, he makes no mention of the scientific censorship that was necessary to promulgate disastrous public policies. He overlooks the essential contributions that citizen scientists made to revealing both Truth and fraud at the time of his writing -- despite the fact that he positions the science of public health and medical research at the core of his arguments.

Ritchie's recommendations fiddle about the edges of centralized, industrialized science. He admits that pre-publication peer-review is not even 100 years old, but lacks an understanding of the problem to which peer-review was purportedly the solution. He misses the fact that the value the journals provide is not truth, but prestige. They are not the gatekeepers to knowledge. They adjudicate only status, and that is the more valuable commodity to the Universities who sell it to their students, their sports fans, and their other stakeholders (including the US government).

Science cannot be "saved" by tuning the knobs on the centralized institutions that have created the status hegemony. Although @NIHDirector_Jay is making incremental improvements in the current structure, I think the topology of science governance must be changed from centralized & oligopolistic to a more decentralized structure prioritizing a marketplace of ideas.

The danger in this approach is that scientific knowledge might be reduced to a click-contest, as if justification of belief were determined by a Prom Queen popularity contest.

Truth must not be subject to secret ballot. However, the problem with the current system of peer review already amounts to little more than that. Our current preoccupation with peer reputation reduces many scientists to the developmental level of the typical Middle School child, whose utmost concern is their standing in the social hierarchy.

One of the most difficult things, in science, in business, in social media, is determining the quality of an idea. In this regard, humans are not equally well-equipped.

There is an acute need for science critics who establish reputations unto themselves for being able to identify and communicate good ideas. Like movie reviewers, or restaurant critics, these professional science critics must operate as journalists, librarians, curators, communicators, and independent arbiters of what knowledge is worth spreading. You might think this is the job that journal Editors are expected to perform and to some extent they do, so long as they do not stray too far from their roles on the stage as scientists themselves.

I'm arguing for a new role entirely, in which experts in critique make their careers as such--not on the stage, but from box seats in the theater.

Perhaps science communicators like @hubermanlab are prototyping the right model, despite the fact that Universities have no idea how to replicate that role within their existing organizational structures. My own view is that the University Library is probably the right place to house this new position of Science Critic, so long as the public and the citizen scientist are also invited.

As a schoolchild in the 1970's I was taught "There is no talking in the library." That model is now out of date. The library must remake itself into a forum for conversations that include pre-publication review, post-publication review, and constant revision of a meritocracy of ideas.

It may be that this new type of "library" cannot exist within the structure of the University, but instead must exist independently such that it can benefit from a multitude of crowd-sourced contributions. For example, it was @MartinKulldorff who first pointed out to me that PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science. What hasn't happened yet is a new realization of what a PLOS should look like in the Information Age.

Both reinvention of the University library and independent, public libraries is called for such that the best forums can compete for the most attention.

Ritchie cannot really be faulted for failing to describe this creative vision. His writing doesn't strike me as particularly creative. Nonetheless, what he offers is not a cogent deconstruction of the existing paradigm, but a smokescreen that would facilitate its further abuse.

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