The Pitchforks Have Arrived.

Hey Friends!

I’ve been giving some public talks of late on Cosmology and Gravitation, and gotten into some heated discussions. More on those later. I’ve been looking to collect my thoughts for a preamble to future talks to take in what I’ve learned from those discussions and advocate for a Science informed policy.

Politics has finally come for Science policy, and I wanted to emphasize to my STEM-employed friends and neighbors that we - the Scientific establishment - shoulder much of the blame for the current state of affairs. It’s a point that doesn't go down easy. But internalizing it might be the medicine we need to right this sinking ship.

The simple two minute preamble exploded into a full blown essay, so I thought I might share it with you here. Sorry to be so dark, but it’s fair to say these aren’t friendly times.

More soon.

Sean

Science doesn’t have a long history. It’s a modern endeavor. While we can trace vestiges of the traditions to ancient times, the form of empiricism we now know as Science is a distinctly modern phenomena.

That said, attempting to register an official history - a precipitating event or individual - is a fool’s errand. It’s a cultral phenomena. Histories can be written, debated and argued over for the rest of time. But History is not a Science.

Humans have many systems of knowledge. Traditions both cultural and practical, many of which likely predate civilization. Tracking and hunting, cooking, agriculture, commerce and medicine have all been with us in one form or another, and all owe their existence to the ingenuity of humans and their empirical abilities.

It is true that Science overlaps with many of these other knowledge systems. Science has taught us much about why many of these ancient ideas work, but it still has much to learn. There is no reason to expect it will know everything the ancients knew any time soon.

Because it has given us so much, and there is prestige implicit to modern life, the desire to include our collective ancestors by conflating Science with their own knowledge systems is relatable, but it is malpractice. It is appropriate and welcome to highlight when modern Science, and its associated technology falls in line with traditional knowledge - or even copies it wholesale! But it is important to remember that Modern Science is something fundamentally new. Confusing that point - even with good intention - leads us astray.

Modern Science is a global, collaborative enterprise that involves experimentation, recording, openly sharing results and ideas with everyone. There are two tenets of modern Science that don’t get the appreciation they deserve: first, Science doggedly re-tests the same ideas again and again, to verify if and to what extent they still hold true. Second, it synthesizes these experimental results, new and old, into a framework that shows how all of these results fit together.

Crackpots and conspiracy theorists are mocked not because they are outnumbered by actual Scientists, but because of their delusions of grandeur. They believe themselves to be rams, smashing their head repeated into a dam of forbidden knowledge. A dam that they believe will burst if only they can persist and convince others to join them. In reality, they are just sad individuals bashing their heads into the side of mountain, confusing the occasional seepage of rain water as evidence of progress.

In Modern Science there is no forbidden knowledge. There can be wrong opinions. There can be bone-headed funding decisions and inappropriate extrapolations. There is certianly inertia, but the truth eventually comes out. Willful suppression of ideas is both counter to the aim of Science and doomed to fail. Falsification is the whole point of experimentation.

Science is complex but also robust. It is anti-fragile. The more you attempt to falsify a result, the stronger Science gets. If there is a flawed argument somewhere, sooner or later it will be exposed, resolved and repaired. The more Scientists there are, the faster this process will happen.

To the extent that you can define Modern Science, anti-fragility should be involved. If new experiments constantly overthrow old experimental results, what you are studying is fragile. Like political polling, you may be engaged in an empirical endeavor, but you capturing a temporal snapshot of some ever changing thing. Something akin to public opinion. There is a lot of value in polling - as there is to understanding the weather, the traffic and economic conditions - but we should probably do better to distinguish these “path-dependent” highly nonlinear empirical endeavors from the study of that which persists.

Put differently, Science transcends empiricism. It is more than experimental measurement. It is almost certiainly true that much of what we loosely call Science today fails to meet that standard.

Science may be anti-fragile, but Science policy has been anything but.

Science is under assault from multiple fronts. Institutional funding for Scientific Research has been slashed. Increased red tape and administrative burden on foreign students and researchers has made a tenuous profession even more difficult to pursue. A culture of deep seated suspicion of expertise has brought divisive politics to public understanding of Science. Conspiracy and superstition has become rampant. As our media ecosystem further fragments, this trend only appears to be accelerating.

But this is a symptom of administrative complacency.

Much of Science in the United States is centrally funded by various government agencies. Small attempts to decentralize this funding have been made, but were meager at best. This wasn’t terrible policy a priori, there are good arguments for it.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Scientists were largely patronized or self-funded. Government funding was nascent and the profession was incredibly exclusive. Clearly our position over a century later was much more inclusive and much more effective. But centralized funding introduced signifigant risk with little if any insurance, as we are now beginning to understand.

Science has had detractors as long as there has been Science. Religon - and its associated cultural morass - is a familiar example. Conspiracy is another. It is a trope that Authoritarians want to suppress knowledge to monopolize the truth. The grand irony of our current age is that the inverse process can also occur.

As our Scientific understanding of the world grows among professionals, it was and is the duty of those professionals to decimate that knowledge. Obstensibly that is was Academia is for. But in our modern age, structural incentives have inverted that mission.

Esteem is given to professors who excel in Research. Teaching is a chore and Outreach is a logistical bar to jump over. Increasingly the burden of teaching falls on Adjunct professors1, who enjoy as little esteem as they do pay and even job security. Notice the emergence of the title “Instructional Professor” as distinct from “Professor”. Serious graduate students are widely discouraged from participating in anything aside from research.

There is minimal professional incentive to disseminate Scientific knowledge, so it is left to the rear guard of Influencers and Content Creators. Unfortunately for the Scientific community, Science Communication is rife with contradiction and riddled with disingenuous iconoclasts.

Unwittingly, practicing Scientists have aggregated themselves behind closed doors, inadvertently hoarding the knowledge - and the esteem - for themselves and their direct benefactors, allowing Conspiracy and Contempt for authority to run roughshod over a Society where economic and social esteem degraded significantly. Heroic attempts by knowing professionals are the exception, rather than the rule, and collectively amount of a pittance.

Who cares to be fascinated by terrifying physics of neutron stars or the beauty of the Octonions when they can’t find a job? When they can’t afford a house?

And so the torches and pitchforks have finally come out.

Science and industry are interdependent and the latter has not often treated people well. Government policy has enforced this for the past forty years. There is good reason be interrogate who funds Science and who funds the policy makers. There are dots to be connected.

Policy makers have worshipped credentials and process at the expense of the common good. They have done this because it is easy. It is work to assess an individual’s knowledge, ask any graduate student working as a grader, or any hiring manager in an interview process. It is much easier to merely glimpse a diploma.

It’s not that credentials are inherently bad, but the problem is that they are not inherently good. It’s just a proxy. Focusing on proxies have exposed blind spots in our leadership. And this dereliction has transferred both economic reward and social esteem away from the general public. The folks who vote. The folks who are left to connect the dots.

Modern Science leads with skepticism and is comfortable with uncertainty. Good practice requires an ethos that acknowledges ignorance. The negligent appeals to proxy under the illusion of “scaling” demonstrates and ethos of arrogance, not rational ignorance.

This is not normal human behavior, and it conflicts with credentialism. We are in an information ecosystem that appears to be rebasing knowledge as we know it. Information is easier to both create and access than ever before. So there is now a fiedelity issue. With the rise of AI powered chat bots who mirror us by construction, we risk a new kind of superstition coming from our relationship these machines. And who owns these machines? Will they connect the dots for us?

Humans have an intrinsic desire to connect dots, and with a flood bad information and instantaneous networking comes conspiracy theories and superstition. Pseudoscientific ideas like the Myers-Briggs personality test, having a “High IQ”, Eugenics or Astrology - anything where a person’s fate or character depend on forces external to their control - have, if you’ll pardon the expression, found their star rising in this new Media age.

Right now? Not much. The cultural and policy mess we find ourselves has taken decades to form. We need to acknowledge that there is nothing to return to. We need to chart a course forward. With so many problems and so much turbulence there is no clear path. I certainly can’t recommend anything concrete at this time.

What I can suggest are a few ideas to ruminate on. Ideas for reflection that I believe will get us moving towards a better future.

1. Social Esteem matters. It drives political opinion. Economics may be a positive sum game, but is the same true for Culture and Respect? What proxies are we defaulting to in our policies and are where else are we avoiding the hard work?

2. Does Science education need to be focused purely on applications? Can we promote the learning of technical Science and Mathematics as we would other cultural knowledge? We celebrate the amateur painters, bakers, songwriters and atheletes. Do we celebrate the amateur mathematican? Can Science be a common good?

3. Where is the line between inclusivity and respect for expertise? Is it more respectful to avoid conflict to make others feel comfortable, or to call out wrong statements.

4. How can we encourage a healthy skepticism and an ethos of rational ignorance in our society, without ceding intellectual authority to those who claim a knowledge that doesn’t exist?

5. Many Scientific results are deeply intertwined. How can we best communicate how deeply the results depend on one another.

6. What is the difference between empiricism and Science? Clearly political polling is a form of empirical analysis that is useful, but the results reflect only a moment in time. What other kinds of empirical programs feel Scientific but may not be? Can we come up with a different category that respects their utility while helps the public understand the distinction.

7. What tools we can create to help people operate in our fractioning media ecosystem?