Science should not be a religion

his week two aging hippies, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, committed fiscal seppuku by taking their music down from Spotify in an attempt to pressure them into censoring a guy named Joe Rogan who, I'm told, has a popular podcast (11 million listeners—three times as many as viewers of Fox cable news and 6.1 times as many as CNN). More will no doubt follow.

For the uninitiated, a podcast is like this thing called ‘radio’ that we had in the old days, but with fewer commercials and less static. (It is a great loss: the static was actually the most interesting part. I was disappointed when NASA shut down its online VLF receiver that picked up atmospheric noise, whistlers, and dawn chorus, and I often kept my car radio tuned to an empty channel to wake me up when the traffic lights changed. Those mechanical switches emitted a strong click on the AM band.)

Science is the Way and the Truth and the Lamp

Joe Rogan's sin was to allow his guests to present views that challenge the establishment narrative about Covid. Declan Leary has a nicely written article about the failed Spotify gambit here. Like so many others, these two musicians have adopted the idea of science as absolute incontrovertible truth and government bureaucracies as its sole voice. If they were correct, then censoring any statement that conflicts with it might be almost understandable. Unfortunately, they are not.

The attitude of Young, Mitchell, and so many others is that science is a religion and we scientists are like unto gods. In their mind we stand upon the Mount, our long white eyebrows blowing in the wind, hurling lightning down upon the unworthy masses and smiting with recombinant DNA those among them who are unbelievers. The records of our eternal truths engraved on the holy tablets of JBC, Neuron, and Phys. Rev. B thunder across the valley in their shining magnificence as we descend like Moses coming down from the third floor of the Lillie Building at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Well, there may be a mixed metaphor in there somewhere, but it's also not what science really is. It's not absolute truth and we are not really gods. What is it, then?

Objectivity and trust of science

There has been long, vigorous debate among philosophers about that. Can science really be ‘objective’? Can we ever really know truth? As with many philosophical debates, the answer depends on the meaning of the term. Thomas Nagel famously said that objectivity is ‘a view from nowhere.’ Heather Douglas said objectivity might be ‘irreducibly complex’^[1] and said that ‘objectivity’ has the “rhetorical force of ‘I endorse this and you should too.’” A better definition might be that scientific objectivity is simply a strategy: being disinterested in the result is the best way to avoid bias. Being disinterested in the social and political ramifications of your findings is also the only way to gain trust in results that the reader does not wish to accept.

In his later years, Thomas Kuhn admitted that his model of ‘paradigm change’ was actually a polite way of saying that science moves by mob psychology ^[3]. Others point out that a scientist's choice of topic is based on personal opinions about what is important. And since my unwanted entry into academia, I've been horrified to see how the sausage of science funding is basted and stewed in grant committee meetings. Science is as much fad chasing and hero worship as any other human activity.

‘Credibility’ is the key concept here. Arthur Fine argued^[2] that we should talk about objectivity as a practical way of identifying which kinds of scientific process are useful. From this it has been suggested that it's a way of signaling epistemic trustworthy sources of information. In order to maintain credibility, scientists must be trusted to design experiments without bias and report their measurements honestly. This implies that science is a social mechanism designed to elicit honest results from dishonest people.

When science goes bad

It should not be a big revelation that there are some dishonest scientists out there. They use inappropriate statistics to prop up failed experiments, run experiments designed to find things they know to be false, suppress findings that conflict with their beliefs, and fail to consider alternative explanations of their results. When practiced correctly, science will usually cancel these mistakes out: the requirement that every statement in a paper be supported by citation or experiment; the requirement to report one's methods and source of reagents in exact detail; the demand for replication; and peer review, while imperfect, all improve the credibility of science.

Science can also be described by contrasting it with non-science. Animal rights activists and global warming activists often use emotional arguments intended to sway the listener to some course of action. One animal rights activist, for instance, tried to appeal to conservatives unhappy with Anthony Fauci by implicating him in ‘cruel and wasteful’ experiments on dogs and “wasteful and fiendish” transgender monkey experiments funded by NIAID. This emotive language is the coin of politics. It is not intended to find the truth but to arouse feelings of fear or disgust. Dispassionate consideration of the costs and benefits, which might convince us their cause is reasonable, is not to be found. Activism of any kind has no connection to truth and gives it little respect. If acted upon it would produce random and possibly catastrophic unforeseen consequences.

When such arguments turn up in scientific papers, or when scientists retract their work because it's being ‘misused’ by people the scientists don't agree with, it is a clear failure of science. Journal editors have an important role in preventing this, and not all are up to the task.

Of course, some scientists may find it convenient for their pronouncements to be accepted without evidence, as if they were infallible high priests. When they succeed, the inevitable outcome is censorship and excom­munica­tion of those with differing views. It might seem ironic, but unless the scientific literature contains contradictory and conflicting claims, it is a sign that some type of censorship is occurring, which means that science has once again gotten stuck in mob psychology, the ‘consensus’ is almost certainly wrong, and the paradigms they are soon to be a-shifting.

Covid misinformation

As for Covid misinformation, it's starting to look as if the vaccine skeptics were right about many things. Scientists are now studying cases where vaccines cause symptoms resembling long Covid, exactly as the vaccine skeptics claimed. Sure, they're still saying things like “We have to be careful to avoid discouraging people from getting vaccinated” to avoid excommunication, but it's now a viable research topic. Our corrupt society forces them to couch their opinions in obscure language to remain employed, but the mechanism of science is strong and, so far, science remains reasonably healthy.

It's true that there are trolls out there who make up ridiculous stuff. There are others who have miscon­strued what they have read. But it's false and scandalous to claim that their misinformation kills people. One could just as easily argue that reporting what Fauci and the CDC have said, which has often been wildly oversimplified to the level of falsehood and at times flat out wrong, is killing people. Or that the news media are killing people by convincing them that science is whatever some celebrity thinks it is.

When establishment science organizations and public health officials deny the very real risks and failures of their own policies, they create an underground movement that seeks the truth. That movement might not get every detail right, but the use of economic pressure to suppress their concerns is contrary to spirit of truth-seeking and honest debate that is the basis of science. Celebrities who censor in the name of science do more harm to science than they can ever know.

Claiming that one's opponent is causing millions of deaths is the modern-day equivalent of calling him Hitler, and it's not helpful. As they say in physics, it is so nonsensical it is not even wrong.

Conclusion

The existence of untruth is not something to be feared. Untruth—the mismatch between what people say and what the evidence shows—is the driving force behind all science. Without it, we would have nothing to design experiments about and—worse—nothing to complain about in faculty meetings, so they'd be even more boring. Censorship is as fatal to science as it is to any other creative endeavor.

As Julius Axelrod (one of the greatest scientists of all time) always used to say, scientists should never worry about being wrong. What should they worry about? I think he would have said they should worry about falling into the temptation of telling people what to do.

Update (Jan 31 2022): James Blunt, the self-effacing British musician who once said, “If you thought 2016 was bad . . . I'm releasing an album in 2017” has jokingly threatened to release his music on Spotify if Joe Rogan isn't removed.

jan 29 2022, 11:02 am. updated jan 31 2022, 4:16 am