Is Science Self-Correcting?

A long-time colleague, in response to a provocative article about the sins of scientists, characterized it as “garbage” and asserted that science is self-correcting.

I should note here that my colleague abhors “extreme” views, and would cross the street to avoid a controversy. As a quondam scientist, he thinks of a challenge to the integrity of science as “extreme.” Which strikes me as an unscientific attitude.

Science is only self-correcting on a time scale of decades, and even centuries. Wrong-headed theories can persist for a very long time. And it has become worse in the past six decades.

What has changed in the past six decades? Sputnik spurred a (relatively) massive increase in government-funded research. This created a new and compelling incentive: produce research that comports with the party line. The party line isn’t necessarily the line of the party then in power, but the line favored by the bureaucrats in charge of doling out money.

On top of that, politically incorrect research is generally frowned upon. And when it surfaces it is attacked en masse by academicians who are eager to prove their political correctness.

Thus it is that the mere coincidence of a rise in CO2 emissions and a rise in temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century became the basis for kludgey models which “prove” AGW — preferably of the “catastrophic” kind — while essentially ignoring eons of evidence to the contrary. Skeptics (i.e., scientists doing what scientists should do) are attacked viciously when they aren’t simply ignored. The attackers are, all too often, people who call themselves scientists.

And thus it is that research into the connection between race and intelligence has been discouraged and even suppressed at universities. This despite truckloads of evidence that there is such a connection.

Those two examples don’t represent all of science, to be sure, but they’re a sad commentary on the state of science — in some fields, at least.

There are many more examples in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policy-Making, edited by Michael Gough. I haven’t read the book, but I’m familiar with most of the cases documented by the contributors. The cases are about scientists behaving badly, and about non-scientists misusing science and advocating policies that lack firm scientific backing.

Scientists have been behaved badly since the dawn of science, though — as discussed above — there are now more (or different) incentives to behave badly than there were in the past. But non-scientists (especially politicians) will behave badly regardless of and contrary to scientific knowledge. So I won’t blame science or scientists for that behavior, except to the extent that scientists are actively abetting the bad behavior of non-scientists.

Which brings me to the matter of science being self-correcting. I am an avid (perhaps rabid) anti-reificationist. So I must say here that there is no such thing as “science.” There’s only what scientists “do” and claim to know.

It’s possible, though not certain, that future scientists will correct the errors of their predecessors — whether those errors arose from honest mistakes or bias. But, in the meantime, the errors persist and are used to abet policies that have costly, harmful, and even fatal consequences for multitudes of people. And most of that damage can’t be undone.

So, in this age of weaponized science, I take no solace in the idea that the errors of its practitioners and abusers might, someday, be recognized. The errors of knowledge might be corrected, but the errors of application are (mostly) beyond remedy.

Here’s an analogy: The errors of the builders, owners, captain, and crew of RMS Titanic seem to have been corrected, in that there hasn’t been a repetition of the conditions and events that led to the ship’s sinking. But that doesn’t make up for the loss of 1,514 lives, the physical and emotional suffering of the 710 survivors, the loss of a majestic ship, the loss of much valuable property, or the grief of the families and friends of those who were lost.

In sum, the claim that science is self-correcting amounts to a fatuous excuse for the irreparable damage that is often done in the name of science.

Related reading: Nathan Cofnas, “Science Is Not Always Self-Correcting“, Foundations of Science 21(3):477-492 (2016)

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Is Science Self-Correcting?

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