Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order nominally aimed at “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. Setting aside the absurdity of “restoring” something that never existed, what does that purport to mean?
Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:
(i) reproducible;
(ii) transparent;
(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;
(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;
(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;
(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;
(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;
(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and
(ix) without conflicts of interest.
It seems like someone in the Trump administration has been following the debate about how the “replication crisis” and reading op-eds in Nature about institutionally mandating the rules of sceince.
Somewhat counterintuitively, however, the “Open Science” reform community that had been publically excoriating science for not doing the things now (provisionally) mandated by the government things is outraged.
Now, that’s a bit unfair. The recent press release opposing the Executive Order by the science reformers at the Center for Open Science is sober and productive. They are correct to note how much worse it is if the state is controlling scientific practice rather than leaving that up to scientific practitioners; I found this paragraph especially compelling:
The Executive Order does not provide any standards for non-scientific information. As a consequence, this Executive Order is positioning policymaking to ignore scientific evidence by holding it to unachievable standards, and to use ideology and non-scientific information by holding it to no standards at all. Responsible policymaking uses the best available evidence.
This is a horrible time for US science, with this latest executive order merely the latest manifestation of the brazenly cynical political power grab over one of our greatest achivements. I’m going to be somewhat critical of the science reform movement, but I’m confident that we agree that the current assault on academic freedom is a horrific overreach of far more significance that what I’ll discuss here.
A recent case from the history of scientific criticism and public demonization of science provides an illustrative parallel. The 90s “Science Wars” pitted scientific “realists” (who, broadly, believe that the phenomena which scientists talk about are “real”, necessary and objectively given) against the “constructivists” or “postmodernists” (who, broadly, believe that those phenomena are the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived).
The latter camp was obviously correct, at the margin. Through careful historical and sociological study, they traced the construction of those phenomena. The blithe faith that Science is a transcendent human endeavor and that all of the activites undertaken by (mainstream, credentialed) scientists is a necessary component of this transcendence does not withstand scrutiny.
As is inevitable with methodological fads, the constructivist critique became a victim of its own success. Bruno Latour notes, sadly, the seeming parallel between cynical climate change agnotologists and his own work as a scientific constructivist:
I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “‘the lack of scientific certainty’” inherent in the construction of facts
It is far too neat to blame Latour and other constructivists for today’s climate denialism — if only academics had that much power! — but I think it is fair to say that they could’ve been more careful and less dogmatic. There is only so much criticism of Science (and Science-ism) the public can experience without questioning the value of the science (funding for academics) they actually pay for. And, in a common failure mode for any social movement, the constructivists became characterized by their most flamboyant members. Latour “punches left” at just such a figure
What has critique become when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness?
but this comes far too late. If the public sees the “Science Wars” as pitting the hard-nosed scientists who make planes fly against this kind of airy-fairy Fr*nch wordcel, it’s not hard to see where their sympathis will lie.
Like with the constructivists, the science reform movement begins with some obviously correct and valuable insights between how scientists mythologize their practices and the way science actually unfolds. And just as we shouldn’t blame Latour for the machinations of ExxonMobil or BP, it is unfair to pin the blame for Gold Star Standards on the science reform movement itself. But I think we can learn something about how to minimize potential backlash to science while still allowing for progress by paying attention to three elements of the science reform programme.
- Too much public self-criticism
- Science cannot be mandated
- …especially not if the mandate is unfunded
On the first point, I blame Twitter more than any person in particular. It insinuited itself into our epistemic culture; we didn’t realize how to grapple with this new technology, and the COVID pandemic exposed cracks in our scientific communication apparatus.
The second point, however, is latent in the program of “Open Sceince.” The kind of scientific perfectibility aimed at in response to the “reproducibility crisis,” especially as it has spread from social psychology to include much of the quantitative social sceinces, becomes too easily authoritarian. The requirement to remove discretion from individual scientists — to have methodological review boards, to bind our hands with preregistration, to remove “researcher degrees of freedom,” to have mandatory replications — implies that there will be someone doing the requiring. None of the reformers ever suggested that this enforcement would come form outside of the academic community — but confronted with the cynically applid power of the US federal government, this is revealed to have been a fragile equilibrium.
The final point seems more niche but is most directly related to the executive order. These “Open Science” mandates were rolled out but not funded, to use some jargon from a US Civics course. Individual scientists had to comply with these new rules, raising the resource and especially time cost for each new publication without any offsetting increase in pay or decrease in workload. The current Exective Order makes the problem dramatically worse, as we’re all being held to such high “standards” that essentially all of our time would need to be devoted to ensuring that we are in compliance.
Too Much Public Self-Criticism
Collins and Evans (2002) introduces the “Science of Expertise and Experience” and is hugely influential in contemporary sociology of sceince — and largely unknown to practicing scientists who stopped engaging with the philosophy of science with Popper. They seek a “third way” or rather a “third wave” of the study of science, moving beyond the hagiography of first wave science-lovers like Robert Merton and the potentially corrosive critique of second-wave postmodernists like Latour. Science, they argue, is a fallible social process rather than a quasi-religious practice that reveals The Truth, but it isn’t exactly the same as all other social processes and attendant knowledge claims.
Science should primarily be understood as expertise — we tend to focus on knowledge as the primary product of science, but (especially for science of immediate interest to the public as opposed to more esoteric “basic” science), the single most important product of science is scientists. We simply cannot extract all scientific knowledge contined in our precious peer-reviewed pdfs and feed it into a Decision Machine to tell us what to do; we need scientists with expertise in order to advise us on complicated questions of the application of scientific knowledge to social/political questions.
So a key part of what scientists do is only really of interest to science; we all acknoweldge that no single study is perfect, and that the process of refining scientific knowledge claims requires a lot of back and forth, debates, theoretical and empirical advances, before we can consider any scientific question anywhere close to settled. To able to be contribute to scientific debates at the frontier of knowledge, people require many years of study and experience; there’s no reason to think that lay members of the public have any standing to evaluate these niche theoretical claims or experimental evidence.
Collins and Evans outline a healthy unfolding of science, where scientists are able to do this crucial knowledge refinement work in private, and only then presenting a position to the public which is never unified but is at least vetted and stable. They also present the negative case: what happens when “science becomes visible before it becomes certain”:
But now [the public] ?nds that the scientists, who previously revealed a relatively united and robust front, argue with each other with different sides having rough parity; they change theirminds, and are no longer a source of con?dence. It is easy to understandwhy scientists prefer to keep their work private until they have reached something closer to unity.
The diagram is a bit baroque, in the tradition of science studies diagrams, but the intuition is simple: scientists need private spaces to refine their work before putting it out into the public.
The development of Science Twitter was, in view of this perspective, a huge mistake. Scientists were tricked by the logic of the platform into having a single, public-facing account where they did three very different kinds of things:
- Had intense debates about the status of scientific research, often criticizing scientific practice.
- Shared their own scientific findings with the public, towards the goal of “impact” so prized by today’s hiring committees and grant awarding institutions.
- Spouted off about their private political opinions.
Each of these things is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing — just not all of them, at once, from the same account.
The internet affords many new communication opportunities, but it’s essential that we figure out how to use the internet in ways that suit our individual and collective goals rather than the way that for-profit corporations have discovered best lets them sell ads. We seriously need to rethink our communication infrastructure and strategy in light of the internet, rather than just taking what these corporations offer us “for free.”
But Collins and Evans framework also makes it clear how catastrophic the COVID case was. In a recent blog post, the excellent Ben Recht says
Part of the mess we’re in now is because the pandemic response cast science, which is always a mess, as THE SCIENCE, which enforced policy. The federal science agencies in the US were not equipped for this task.
The enormity of the demand for information combined with the immediacy of the communication technology means that we all got to see “science become visible before it became certain.” COVID was unlike, say, nuclear energy regulation because everyone was immediately affected by it, and everyone had direct experience and thus possible expertise about it. Per Collins and Evans, this means that we should be democratizing decision-making and not deferring to experts. But everyone was affected by everyone else’s actions — a decentralized response seems like it would’ve been chaotic and far worse than we got.
COVID was a terrible stress-test of our scientific policy and communication system — and it’s difficult to believe that the previous decade of sometimes histrionic public self-criticism of science’s flaws didn’t soften the ground for the present mandated scientific straightjacket.
Overall, I think this angle is mostly an unfortunate confluence of Twitter and the pandemic that would’ve been difficult to avoid, even if we can and must do better with how we use the interent. But promoiting the idea that science can be mandated is a more specific cause of the current mandating of science “reform” from the Gold Star fiasco.
Science Cannot be Mandated
“Open Science” is meant to make science more transparent, to break down the opaque and esoteric scientific process into discrete, verifiable chunks. Rather than cultivating unique, idiosyncratic scientists and their concomitant expertise, the “Open Science” approach aims to make practicing scientists more or less interchangeable cogs in a great machine of science. If your work is replicable, that means that other people can do it — and that, ex ante, we can set public standards for what methods count as “good science.”
The approach to reform is far more less authoritarian than that of the Trump adminisitration, but at the end of the day, there’s still the explicit goal of making elements of science required. This is the pyramad of culture change advocated by the same Center for Open Science who published the press release from the intro:
The bottom of the pyramid is entirely unobjectionable; this is how science should progress, developing tools and communities that make your preferred vision of science easier. This is basically what Latour describes as Science in Action: actions are transformed into “methods” the more they are black-boxed, the more that the scientific community comes to accept them as given in the course of research.
In the beginning, a paper using something like “pre-registration” requires a lot of citations for the procedure, explaining to potentially unfamiliar readers what it is and why they should trust it. Over time, as the procedure becomes more accepted, fewer citations are needed; eventually, once the idea can be presented on its own without citation, it has become a “fact” of the scientific process.
Notice, however, that Latour never talks about “facts” being required. If a community of scientists all agree on the process as a standard, stable method from their toolkit, no requirement is necessary; if that community doesn’t all agree, who would have the standing to decide what is required?
Well, Trump has decided that he has the standing. And that’s clearly bad. Worse, still, is that he’s cutting science funding while imposing these mandates, making them all unfunded.
….especially not if the mandate is unfunded
The “incentives” in the fourth tier of the Pyramid of Culture Change are not, unfortunately, financial: they have primarily taken the form of Open Science “badges” that signify that a given publication conforms with certain practices.
The resulting social pressure is a cost-effective way to promulgate norms — cost-effective, that is, from the perspective of the reformer, not necessarily anyone else in the system who decides to adapt to the changing norms.
The result, as Thomas J. Hostler writes in The Invisible Workload of Open Research, is
a clear danger that additional expectations to engage in open practices add to the workload burden and increase pressure on academics even further…It is argued that there is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics
There is a non-zero administrative burden associated with every form of mandate. These have traditionally been imposed by universities (via IRBs, inane training modules) and by journals (checklists, mandatory COI or funding statements). For a recent and I think amusing example of the latter, here is a funding statement from a book review published by my dad:
These are all annoying and much of the effort is entirely wasted, but they were mostly unrelated to the process of science itself. In contrast, the journal-imposed mandates around computational reproducibility have been inserted in the middle of the publication process.
I’m not against mandatory computational reproducibility (and, more basically, open data/code) for a certain class of work; it does seem important to catch coding erorrs and to serve as a resource for future researchers. This all comes with a cost, though, one born by journals in addition to authors.
During the pandemic, I had the memorable experience of dealing with a computational reproducibility check which a journal had assigned to an undergraduate student. They were quite busy; they answered my email asking for an update on the reproducibility check by saying that it was on their to-do list but that they were currently “slammed with midterms.”
Making something mandatory but requiring undergraduates to magically develop superhuman time management for them to function properly is not a viable solution. In line with my longstanding concern with temporal validity, this approach treats the speed of publication as scientifically irrelevant — which, especially in the case of digital media, is obviously false.
The Trump Executive Order realizes Hostler’s prediction at a far greater scale than anyone could’ve forseen. Science and scientists are (apparently) to be held to a literally impossibly high standard through these proliferating and even mutually exclusive unfunded mandates.[2] The fact that this is being done simultaneously with severe and arbitrary budget cuts makes clear that the goal is not in fact to improve the quality of science but rather to hamstring scientists.
My primary reaction to the Gold Standard Science Executive Order is a profound sadness. The specific policies are of course absurd. Worse, even if a more sane administration reverse the policies, this EO represents a ratcheting up of the politicization of science, something that is extremely difficult to undo.
But science will go on. As will sharply differing opinions about what constitutes good science, how we should be spending our energies. My hope is that the next round of this debate takes extra care to demonstrate to the public the value of what we scientists do — and that it recognizes the importance of scientific freedom in every particular of scientific practice.
1 Since this is so often misconstrued, let’s revisit what Feyerabend means by this. From Wikipedia: “In Feyerabend’s words, “‘anything goes’ is not a ‘principle’ I hold… but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history.”[90] On this interpretation, Feyerabend aims to show that no methodological view can be held as fixed and universal and therefore the only fixed and universal rule would be “anything goes” which would be useless.”
2 These two points from the EO are basically mutually exclusive (v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions; (vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses. If we are skeptical of our assumptions then no test can falsify our hypotheses; they could always just be evidence that our assumptions are false. (YES, to the four of you reading this who care, this is a more general problem with falsificationism).
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
Cheez Whiz 06.02.25 at 4:05 pm
Taking this “Gold Standard” science EO seriously is a bad idea. Trumpism is taking on science for the same reason it is taking on the Judiciary, they are both opposed to the core philosophy of Trumpism, that reality must be modified to fit the needs of Trump. Batting about known flaws in the practice of science simply applies a veneer of legitimacy to a propaganda campaign uninterested in science beyond another opponent to crush.
steven t johnson 06.02.25 at 5:52 pm
Good post. In particular, the parenthetical remark in the second footnote was particularly effective in cutting down to a root issue. Being me, I will note that Sir Karl Popper, of the Mont Pelerin Society, was the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies. I venture to suggest that this political intervention lies behind the appeal of falsificationism. Therefore its resurrection in this executive order is unsurprising to me. It is itself a political stance.
It is tempting to comment on the points from the executive order one by one. But rather than be tedious, I will only note that the concept of interest is inherently vague. Credit is an interest. Should papers be anonymous? Conformity to conventional wisdom, which includes economic and political interests narrowly defined, but also all manner of notions about human nature, reality, morality, religion, can be a personal interest…as can the desire to be shocking, attention-seeking. Notions of good manners, collegiality, which can even descend to grammar and vocabulary, can be an interest. Should it be required that each paper resolve those conflicts by being sure to cite and praise the works of every colleague?
An undefinable offense which is nonetheless mandated can be a very useful tool for an administration which can single out offenders. It may be irrational in one sense to single out this person rather than others for attack…but that can make the examples set even more intimidating for the rest. If anyone can be attacked, who can be safe?
Casey Ydenberg 06.02.25 at 8:14 pm
The postmodernists went to war with the whole idea that objective reality was even A Thing. They did it in the name of emancipation, but should we really be surprised that grifters and would-be dictators were the ones who picked up the ball?
Alex SL 06.02.25 at 10:37 pm
“constructivists” or “postmodernists” (who, broadly, believe that those phenomena are the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived). The latter camp was obviously correct, at the margin.
As a scientist, I have never understood this belief. What is it supposed to mean that the phenomena which scientists talk about are subjectively defined? If, instead of ‘Western’ scientists, Chinese scientists had first resolved the molecular structure of water, it would contain five oxygen atoms and three sulfur atoms instead of two hydrogen and one oxygen? That the moon would be merely one kilometer above us, very small, and stationary instead of 300,000 km away, large, and rotating around the Earth? That it is a matter of subjective opinion whether viruses exist? I am sorry to say that while we may use different words in different languages, all of those are questions of fact, and getting them wrong would variously have interesting, albeit unfortunate, results for anybody trying their hand at chemical reactions, moon landings, and public health.
I can only assume that an enormous motte and bailey is going on with this. “Through careful historical and sociological study, they traced the construction of those phenomena.” Does this merely mean that a thousand years ago, there were no scientific journals, and now they are so, thus science is a social construct? If not, what does it mean?
The second footnote is perhaps illustrative. With respect, it reveals a thinking that is rigid and disconnected from the practice of research. Instead of logical deduction from first principles, scientific practice is a heuristic process; instead of binary false or correct, we generally deal with probability and levels of confidence. Therefore, there is no contradiction between falsification and skepticism of findings and assumptions.
Part of the problem may also be that people constantly conflate three components of “science”:
(1) The community of scientists and their institutions, including universities, laboratories, societies, and journals. Yes, how exactly we do peer review or format our papers or in what language we communicate is social and to a large degree arbitrary. The community is made up of humans, who sometimes make mistakes or cheat.
(2) The scientific method. It is non-subjective by deliberate design, because it has been developed to include any method that reliably works to resolve empirical questions and to exclude any methods that doesn’t. The only way to claim that it is subjectively constructed is by allowing a hypothetical alternative science that isn’t actually science because it includes methods like praying to the gods for information or ipse dixit.
(3) Scientific knowledge, which is what ultimately really matters in this discussion. Similar to the previous, it is non-subjective by design because it is constantly being revised to exclude claims that have been disproved by empirical evidence. But, again: a heuristic approximation process. The main problem of science communication is that people struggle with changing information; they want The Truth, unchanging, authoritative. Ironically, they lose confidence with those who are honest enough to admit to their past mistakes while trusting charlatans who confidently double down on wrongness.
The trick of those who argue that “science” is socially constructed, be it a creationist or a postmodernist, is to conflate these three components, to insinuate that the arbitrary aspects of the first helplessly contaminate the third. It is like claiming that you can walk through a wall because it was built by a US bricklayer but could have been built in a different way by an Incan artisan. It is howling nonsense.
But yes, the only claim that might be sillier is that postmodernist sociology has in any way led to right-wing attacks on science; well above 95% of academia never took postmodernism seriously even at its height, and most people outside of academia have never heard that that movement existed. The “science reform movement” may be more relevant, although even as a scientist myself, I am surprised at the implication that such a thing exists as a coherent movement. I know there is a very loud minority of colleagues who promote Obviously Bad Ideas like author-pays publishing*, fully open peer review**, and paid peer review***, but again the public at large has no idea they even exist, or even just how peer review works. Most voters would be surprised to learn about the existence of Elsevier or the fact that fruit flies are used in research or the fact that there is more than one species of Drosophilidae. Similarly, what percentage of the population were even on Twitter, following scientists’ discussions among themselves, as opposed to Facebook and Tiktok?
No, the right wing is perfectly able to despise science and scientists without scientists criticising each other publicly. This goes back all the way to vaccine denialism of the 18th century and is merely taking new forms as new culture war topics are invented.
*) Obviously bad because it is a major hurdle for poorly resourced scientists who now cannot publish, and it changes incentives for publishers towards accepting everything no matter how bad.
**) Obviously bad because it could be career suicide for a postdoc to provide honest feedback on the manuscript of a very influential professor in their field if they have to sign their name to it. Even if in reality that professor isn’t vindictive, the possibility that they are has a chilling effect.
***) Obviously bad because it would multiply publication fees and again lead to perverse incentives and review-for-hire gig workers.
J-D 06.03.25 at 12:19 am
It is true that:
We derive understanding of reality from social processes.
From this premise it does not follow that:
We derive no understanding of reality.
It can’t follow! Obviously! Indeed, such a conclusion would contradict the premise.
On the contrary, the premise necessarily entails this conclusion:
We do derive understanding of reality.
Counterintuitively? Perhaps your intuitions about the use of language by authority are different from mine?
dk 06.03.25 at 3:26 am
Strawman much?
J-D 06.03.25 at 11:22 am
I don’t know. Maybe so. But even if it, the motte is still worth paying attention to.
Consider this, for example. It’s something I heard which I don’t have the expertise to vouch for, but to me it seems like a clear example of the kind of thing which could easily be true. For years, information about what the typical signs and symptoms of a heart attack are were (so I heard it alleged) actually information about what the typical signs and symptoms of a heart attack in a man are; the typical signs and symptoms of a heart attack in a woman are not completely different but there are significant differences. That doesn’t mean that the earlier scientific reports of the typical signs an symptoms of a heart attack were a fabrication: there was genuine understanding of reality there, but it was–in a specific and important way, with serious practical implications–a biassed and distorted understanding of reality.
I’m not a cardiologist or a diagnostician or, indeed, any kind of health professional. I’m not vouching for the certain truth of this particular example. But are you sure it isn’t true? And even if you do have expert knowledge which gives you good reason to be sure it isn’t true, are you sure that nothing similar has ever happened in any case?
I commented previously that we derive understanding of reality from social processes. If those social processes are affected by bias, then the understanding they produce may also be affected by that bias. An understanding distorted by bias can still be a genuine understanding and better than no understanding at all, but that’s not a good reason for dismissing the bias and its effects.
Maybe you would respond that it’s precisely a more rigorous and systematic application of a scientific approach which can disclose this kind of bias and help to correct for it. If you did, I would agree with you! But don’t you think scientists should welcome the occasional reminder (even if it comes from a non-scientist) of the existence of this kind of bias and the desirability of guarding against it and correcting for it?
None of this, I hope it doesn’t actually need to be said, is reason to be duped by Trumpist charades, which right now are by far the bigger danger.
J, not that one 06.03.25 at 4:16 pm
Recently I discovered that Latour, for me, has the unique quality that the more I read him, the more I dislike him. It seems to me that in science studies there is almost always a motte and bailey. One the one hand, scientists are people, things get overlooked because of personalities or funding, things get done because of institutional structures put in place by non-scientists (I think this was one of the themes of Science in Action but it might have been another book). On the other hand, somebody somewhere is wrong about something, and it matters. On the one hand, a biography of a scientist can be written that isn’t just a narrative of genius looking beyond the veil, but involves contingency and collaboration. On the other hand, we have seat belts (I swear he uses this example) because government bureaucrats are overly focused on the idea that technology can make us safe, and don’t pay enough attention to the needs of parents. On the one hand, the smallpox vaccine works, on the other scientists supposedly confuse what they’re doing with metaphysical certainty and never heard of Hume, and liberal bureaucrats used the police state to enforce vaccination on the public. There’s always less an attempt to build a knowledgeable community than an attempt to accuse people of failings and to take (in the broad sense) political positions.
somebody who reads the news 06.03.25 at 6:20 pm
The “science wars” controversy was already late to the table. As always, the power in Questioning Deeply Held Scientific Beliefs wasn’t with the postmodern philosopher adjunct being paid $17,000 a year begging people to observe how “science” actually progresses, but with the tweedy, patch-on-the-elbows caliper men furious that science had temporarily theorized that, technically, black people weren’t inferior to white people. All the postmodern boys got fired and shut up by 2002 and now spend their time wondering If 9/11 Really Happened, Man, yet the science warriors with the actual power, the sailers, pinkers, alexanders and murrays each get monthly 1.9 million dollar checks from peter thiel’s institute to write in Kaliper Klaire’s Kwarterly that if you think about it, Michelle Obama probably had an IQ of 32.
Alex SL 06.03.25 at 10:15 pm
J-D,
Nobody doubts that biases exist and are a problem. As I wrote, “the community [of scientists] is made up of humans, who sometimes make mistakes or cheat”. But that motte doesn’t get us anywhere close to the bailey of “the phenomena which scientists talk about are the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived”. That statement can only be read to mean that atoms, X-chromosomes, climate, natural selection, and the structure of the glucose molecule are made up and melt away if we adopt a different subjective viewpoint or cultural context. If the sentence isn’t supposed to mean that, then it should have been rewritten to read something like “we all share the same empirical reality regardless of our cultures, but researchers sometimes make mistakes because they have biases”.
But that is the motte-and-bailey trick: what do you mean, Alex SL, I didn’t actually write that in Egypt in 2000 BCE, water would not have had two hydrogen atoms, I merely tried to lead people to the conclusion that the number of hydrogen atoms in a water molecule “is the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived” while leaving just enough ambiguity to retreat to my motte of “humans have cognitive biases” when challenged.
KT2 06.04.25 at 3:36 am
Science as per the EO, gold or otherwise, is a weapon, not the cause of the EO.
tldr: Trump’s Executive Order’s … “goal is not in fact to improve the quality of [insert: topic] but rather to hamstring [insert: control outgroup].”
Any discussion here other than how to support sensible mid term election outcome, and election safety, is unwarrented, and shows you’ve been owned…
Because science will survive. With or without you, me, EO’s, or the Cantaloupe Caligulula cabal.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And leads to… they came foy you.
See TCFY #1 & #2.
Squealer says; “But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? “Bravery is not enough,” “Loyalty and obedience are more important.”
~ Chapter 5, Animal Farm by George Orwell
Yet a strange bedfellow (Donkey in Animal Farm?)… “NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who told Politico this month that he would let his agency’s scientists publish freely, and had even removed the existing requirement for prepublication review by supervisors”. [fn.Jay Bhattacharya]
###
TCFY#1.
And just to rub salt in, expect a “legal” notice soon from your friendly “loyalist prosecutor”;
“Medical journals receive “intimidating” letters from Trump loyalist prosecutor”
Published 23 April 2025
“The letters were sent by Edward Martin Jr, a Republican activist appointed US attorney in Washington, DC, by Donald Trump.”
“It has been brought to my attention,” wrote Martin, “that more and more journals and publications like Chest journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r812
And who is… Edward Robert Martin Jr.?
“… an American conservative activist,[2][3][4] politician, and lawyer,….. Appointed by President Donald Trump in January 2025,[5]”
…
“Prior to his appointment as interim attorney for the District of Columbia, Martin represented three January 6 defendants, including a member of the Proud Boys who pleaded guilty to felony charges. On January 6, he posted on social media from the Capitol area, describing the crowd as “rowdy” but “nothing out of hand”.[37] Before his appointment, Martin had been an active supporter of January 6 defendants as legal counsel. His foundation hosted a 2024 banquet at Trump’s Bedminster golf club honoring Nazi sympahizer, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a convicted Capitol riot participant as an “extraordinary man”. In April 2025, he apologized claiming he was not aware of the full extent of Hale-Cusanelli’s views.[38]”
Wikipedia Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician)
fn.Jay Bhattacharya
The only ray of hope I saw was the internal juxtapositions and tensions of the ingroup power players, between RFK Jr & Jay “courtesy professorships” [fn.2] Bhattacharya…
“In 2010 the Lancet also retracted an infamous but fraudulent 1998 article by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism.”
…
“Kennedy’s plans appear to contradict those of his direct subordinate, new NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who told Politico this month that he would let his agency’s scientists publish freely, and had even removed the existing requirement for prepublication review by supervisors.4”
“RFK Jr threatens to stop US scientists from publishing in major medical journals”
Published 29 May 2025
BMJ 2025;389:r1110
fn.2
Jay Bhattacharya has “held a research fellowship at the Hoover Institution from 2006 to 2008.”
“At Stanford University, Bhattacharya holds multiple academic appointments. He serves as a professor of medicine, with courtesy professorships in both economics and health research and policy.
Wikipedia ~ Jay Bhattacharya
What is a courtesy professorship? No badges, reproductions or proof of verasity of contribution needed it seems “in ways less formal than would justify a joint appointment”.
“2.6.5 Courtesy Appointments
2.6.5.1 General Principles
“Faculty members often make substantial contributions to departments other than their own, but in ways less formal than would justify a joint appointment. These contributions are sometimes recognized by means of courtesy appointments.”
~ facultyhandbook stanford /chapter-2-appointments-reappointments-and-promotions-professoriate
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“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
Charles Babbage
TCFY #2.
“More on the emptiness of the government’s “gold standard science” slogan”
Posted on June 3, 2025 9:55 PM by Andrew [Gelman]
“Yesterday we discussed the ridiculousness of the government mandating so-called gold standard science while at the same time promoting fraudulent, debunked, and flat-out fake research.
“Since then, I came across a relevant news item, this one regarding the FBI:
“Agents have been forced out. Others have been demoted or put on leave with no explanation. And in an effort to hunt down the sources of news leaks, Mr. Patel is forcing employees to take polygraph tests.
“Polygraph tests are not gold standard science.”
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/03/more-on-the-emptiness-of-the-governments-gold-standard-science-slogan/
Yesterday.
“Gold standard science”
Posted on June 3, 2025 9:13 AM by Andrew [Gelman]
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/03/gold-standard-science/
afeman 06.04.25 at 12:54 pm
somebody wh0…,
I’ve often heard of these tendencies that get perhaps unfairly labeled postmodern (I mean unfair to postmodernism) as being alternately a fringe phenomenon or so last century. While I don’t hear about them as much as I did a decade ago, characters who still argue in this manner such as Daniel Sarewitz and Warren Pearce hold full professorships, as did Roger Pielke Jr., whose work overlapped with theirs, until recently when he left for the American Enterprise Institute.
…yet the science warriors with the actual power, the sailers, pinkers, alexanders and murrays…, which just goes to show how low the bar is to be regarded as speaking For Science: you just have to claim it. Meanwhile, biological anthropologists not getting the Thiel money look on in dismay.
J-D,
But don’t you think scientists should welcome the occasional reminder (even if it comes from a non-scientist) of the existence of this kind of bias and the desirability of guarding against it and correcting for it?
As you say, this provides no excuse for Trumpist charades, but I would note that studies of this sort of phenomenon are precisely what this administration is suppressing in its purges at NIH and NSF. That is to say, it had been an actively funded sector of inquiry, until the past few months.
I intend no general endorsement of Alan Sokal’s work, especially since his stunt, but I’m reminded of how in his reveal he endorsed exploration of ways in which social and political factors can bias the explorations and findings of physical scientists. That was 30 years ago. It’s not a taboo subject!
MisterMr 06.04.25 at 2:11 pm
@Alex SL
At best of my understanding, postmodernism in general mankes more sense as a critic of culture in general, and of some non-STEM forms of knowledge like historyography.
But the various postmodernist philosophers, being a side in a cultural war with another, took an excessive form of this relativism when applied even to STEM-like kinds of knowledge (the other side doing the reverse, since in some cases we have “objective” truths, then we can have objective truths everywhere).
Postmodernism though can be better understood as saying that there is always a point of view in each form of knowledge, but if we apply this to STEM-like knowledge this is true but trivial since the point of view we use to understand how e.g. viruses work, or the law of gravity, isn’t really dependent on politics or culture, so the “relativism” point is kinda moot.
Tm 06.04.25 at 2:53 pm
This is an interesting article but I find the example of a funding statement as an example of a useless and wasteful mandate weird. Who funded the work is a really important disclosure and hardly a huge burden since everybody knows who they are funded by. And if there’s no external funding involved, the funding statement is short and easy to write.
Alex SL 06.04.25 at 9:35 pm
MisterMr,
“True but trivial” is a good way of putting it. There are many statements that can be interpreted in two ways, one of them where the statement is true but trivial, the other where it would be interesting and novel if it were true, but it is actually nonsense. So it is in this case. “Actually, albinism being cause by this gene is merely a Western concept, equally valid is the cultural perspective of this tribe who says albino children are demons and need to be killed” is an interesting thought but wrong; “because of male bias, research has neglected certain disorders that primarily affect women” is true but non-controversial outside of conservative crankdom and not a fundamental flaw of the scientific worldview as such.
Tm,
Yes, that example is a bit silly, and any of these statements is easily completed to the satisfaction of the publisher by entering “the authors declare no xzy”. Still, the post recognises IMO correctly that we are drowning in ever more box-ticking exercises and administrative bloat. There was a time when I sent a manuscript to the editor via email, and the manuscript contained an acknowledgement section at the end. Now, I spend half a day wrangling with Editorial Manager to submit an article and may have it immediately bounced back to me with “tables should be separate document, not part of the main document, please revise and resubmit”. And the manuscript file needs to contain not only acknowledgements but a funding statement, a conflict of interest declaration, an ethical statement, an author contribution statement, a list of the authors’ ORCIDs (or, to quote a recent interface, ORCID IDs, argh), and a data availability statement.
The latter is the most important, and one might argue the only important statement of all of these. If I have a concern about the attitude of the post regarding supposedly wasteful mandates, it is that it doesn’t appear to take that aspect seriously enough. “I’m not against mandatory computational reproducibility (and, more basically, open data/code) for a certain class of work” is a bit of a red flag. Shouldn’t all science make data and code available so that the work can be reproduced, checked, and built upon? Is it even science if the evidence is hidden, and the basis of argument is therefore “trust me, bro”, as ipse dixit is called in our age? (Narrator’s voice: it isn’t.)
J-D 06.05.25 at 12:00 am
No, indeed, and if I suggested that it was I apologise.
There are many things I am aware of and yet for which I find it valuable to have the occasional reminder. Am I over-generalising to suppose that the same is true for others?
Tm 06.05.25 at 6:19 am
Alex, I understand what you describe is indeed a burden on scientists, I didn’t mean to triviliaze that aspect. But isn’t much of it (file formating guidelines etc.) simply bureaucratization in response to an exponentially increasing publication volume? That should be discussed separately from “political” requirements like conflict of interest statements and data availability, many of which are indeed good and necessary, and it’s not helpful to anybody to mix these up, as the OP seems to be doing.
Tm 06.05.25 at 6:33 am
Since the “Experts” thread is closed and the topic is kind of related, may i be forgiven for a slightly OT remark.
Do you know the book “Trust us we’re experts – How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future”? It’s an example of criticism from the left of supposedly corrupt or manipulated science, of the kind that fascists like RFK Jr. are now tapping into. The book seems to have been well researched and no doubt the phenomenon is real. But in retrospect perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to frame the problem as an “us vs the experts” issue.
I am well familiar with that kind of critique of science. It was until recently a truism that the scientific establishment was aligned with the powers to be, and from a leftist point of view it was an obvious target of criticism. Few of us saw it coming that big money would decide it was better to destroy the scientific establishment than to attempt to control it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Us%2C_We're_Experts
https://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html
MisterMr 06.05.25 at 12:08 pm
@Akex Sl 15
The “true but trivial” is true in STEM-like subjects, but in others, e.g. in sociology, it isn’t, so for example:
Does the PMC really exist? Is it really a “class”?
The answer to this question depends very much on the point of view, and in these kind of subjects it seems to me that some realtivism makes sense.
But what is the difference between STEM-like subjects and sociology-like subjects?
Is there really a correct point of view that we already have in STEM and if we found it for sociology we could solve sociology?
Or if there is a qualitative difference between sociology, psychology, economics etc. VS STEM? And what is that?
If you see this as a problem of philosophy of science, it is a interesting and hard question.
So the “postmodernist” crew just took the sociology-like subjects as a model and used that model to understand also the STEM subjects, dubious but not really worse than taking the STEM subjects as a model and use it to understand the sociology-like subjects.
This however had the side effect of stressing a lot of “true but trivial” relativism about STEM, because it is difficult to explain why in one case is trivial and in the other is important.
IMHO
Alex SL 06.06.25 at 12:40 am
MisterMr,
I am not, of course, a philosopher of science, but I find it difficult to see the difference in principle.
For STEM, take a statement like, “the moon is ca. 384,000 km away and made of rock”. All reasonable people would have to agree that this is an empirical question that is either true or false and falsifiable, allowing for some error bars because of the “ca.” and the distance slightly changing over time. At least if we find that the moon is only 1,000 km away or that it is four light years away or that it is made of cheese, it is tentatively falsified. (Until somebody finds the error in our measurements, thus no contradiction between falsificationism and maintaining some uncertainty.)
But the statement only makes sense and is falsifiable to the degree that the reader understands concepts like “km” and “moon”. Hidden behind that sentence are centuries of both other research and shared definitions. You and I know well what a kilometer is and what “away” means, but even if we need to do so because we are coming from a very different cultural background, we can look up the Ur-meter in Paris, go down the history of science rabbit hole to understand the methodological details behind measuring astronomical distances, and clarify the meaning of “rock”.
Now, how is non-STEM different? I had to think for a moment to remember what PMC is, as it is not part of my active vocabulary. But we can make the question of whether the PMC is a class a falsifiable, binary true or false statement by agreeing on definitions of the concepts PMC and class and having standards for collecting and evaluating evidence. Sure, somebody can then say, that’s not what I mean with class; but so could somebody come and say, that’s not what I mean with moon. The only difference is that people are more motivated to quibble over definitions in politically charged areas than they are in those that are not politically charged. For a similar problem in what should be a simple STEM question, consider the mental contortions creationists went through to weaponise a caricature of information theory for their purposes.
Dishonest actors can always try to twist definitions or muddy the waters more generally, be it in STEM or in the social sciences. The methodologies are also often necessarily different, as it would not be ethical to do controlled, double-blind experiments on an entire economy affecting many human lives as we can do on, e.g., a chemical process. but I do not see how a question of humans and society existing and behaving in the empirical world is epistemically different from atoms or algae existing and behaving in the empirical world.
Values, however, are a different matter.
Tm 06.06.25 at 10:48 am
I agree with Alex. Definitions are always contentious, and to some extent arbitrary (Hilbert comes to mind with his “we could say tables and chairs instead of points and lines”). That is true in the hard sciences as well, concepts like atoms and so on are really hard to precisely define. But it is possible – the history of science proves it – to come up with definitions that lead to empirically verifiable scientific truth. I’m willing to put that word truth here, I know it’s contentious, but yes I do think we can and should treat scientific results as truth (always keeping in mind that they may be incomplete truths, to be clarified and complemented by further research.
I don’t see that this is impossible in social sciences. I think there are social science results that are certain enough to be accepted as truth, for example we can make empirically verifiably statements about social and economic inequality and discrimination.
It may seem that definitions are more contentious in the social than in the hard sciences. The problem with concepts like PMC however is not that it’s impossible or even difficult to come up with a clear and consistent definition, it’s that too many speakers do not clarify the definition they use and/or are not consistent in their usage. For my part I have yet to see a definition of PMC that is both precise and consistent and meaningful to actually analyze nontrivial social phenomena. That may be because I encounter the term in online discussions with people who are not actually competent in the social science, or it may be that the concept just isn’t useful.
MisterMr 06.06.25 at 11:16 am
@Alex SL 20
In my opinion, there is a difference, which is that “humanistic” disciplines deal with complex objects, and those complex objects do not have a clear delimitation in the same way the moon has a clear delimitation, so that it would be weird for someone to say “no, by moon I only mean that part of what other call moon that lies 12kms under the surface”, but is not weird to say “by PMC I only mean those people who have degrees and a managerial role” or “by PMC I only mean those who have a PHD and earn more than X”.
The problem is that the moon is a “thing”, whereas classes are a way to describe an emergent phenomenon that is complex and multifaceted and therefore today the first definbition of the PMC might make sense, but tomorrow the second definition of PMC might make more sense etc..
Another difference is that if we are measuring the distance from the moon in KMs or in yards, we are still measuring the same thing and with a simple multiplication we can go from a measure to the other, but with the different definitions of the PMC we are literally measuring two related but different things.
Now, what is the correct conceptualisation of the PMC? Well, it depends on what we want to know, which ultimately is a matter of values.
Note that I’m not saying “if I’m a leftie I choose this definition because it gives results that suit my own agenda”, I’m saying “the correct definition of classes depends on the social dynamic that I want to investigate”, that is a completely different argument, but unfortunately leaves a lot of space for people who just want to prove their own agenda.
Since this sort of problem is ubiquitous in social sciences, but not in STEM, I think many STEM guys tend to mistake the problem for a problem of bias, but in reality it is a much deeper problem, that doesn’t exist in STEM stuff because, basically, we only can have STEM-like sciences where this problem doesn’t exist.
So, this doesn’t make the sort of extremistic relativism that is associated with postmodernism true, but partially explains where they come from, e.g. if I only accept a definition of classes that os based on Marx I will only always see only the problems that were relevant for Marx, but not the rest (this was IMHO the actual concern they had and the reason they are sometimes considered righties).
Again, I don’t really agree with that sort of extreme relativism, also because at some point it became just an intellectual fad, but they were referring to a really existing problem.
engels 06.06.25 at 12:49 pm
the moon has a clear delimitation… the moon is a “thing”
How does this apply to eg string theory or algebraic topology?
steven t johnson 06.06.25 at 2:48 pm
The exchange on philosophy of science in the comments is not really very far from the OP. The ix points in the Gold Standard EO simply fail to address the best standards of science. The OP is correct in that I believe.
Exploring some issues further? MisterMr@19 “Does the PMC really exist? Is it really a “class”?
The answer to this question depends very much on the point of view, and in these kind of subjects it seems to me that some relativism makes sense.”
But to my knowledge, the point of view does not matter one bit. I know of no notion of PMC that is coherent enough to attempt to actually use in any perspective at all. It is not clear why only some professions count or why only some managers count. It isn’t clear what it means to be a class. There is no way to estimate the numbers of PMC, changes in their composition by recruitment, the overall position in the income and property distribution, generational longevity, access to political office. What could “the social reproduction of capitalism” mean when it is somehow detached from production for profit?
Any rhetorical usage of PMC that seems to make sense I suppose can be said to depend on “values” in the sense of personal emotional response…but I think that practice commits to denying reality objective existence, except without the rigor of Platonist mathematics. Whether social or natural sciences, there is a commitment to confronting objective reality via some sort of reliable methods. I suppose you could insist that is a “value” to think that there is even an objective reality—but isn’t that proposition rather a very abstract conclusion turned into a premise? As I recall Bishop Berekeley complained how people misunderstood that denying objective reality left the conventional perceptions not only unchallenged, but privileged against the claims of science (in general.) Seems to me that was the point then, and now.
But looking from a different perspective, it is a little surprising that the distinction between the laboratory experimental sciences and the historical sciences is overlooked. The discussion of the Moon forgets Theia. If there was no Theia, the scientific understanding of the Moon is not so clear cut. For that matter if one defines a moon as a body the orbits the center of a planet itself orbiting a star, is the Moon (like Charon) a moon? How divergent from the center of the planet can the so-called barycenter, the center of mass orbited by the two objects (planet and moon) be, before we need to take into account?
The acronym STEM itself can be baffling, if you scrape away the patina from common usage. Science—as if there is a single scientific method. It is not crazy to speak of the Sweet Science. Technology—the practical definition as stuff you can find in catalogs with price lists is well, practical. But as an actual thing in itself, “technology” is even more amorphous and abstracts (see W. Brian Arthur?) Engineering—Draw a Venn diagram of “engineering,” “architecture,” and “art.” Also, I think it reasonable to say that finding novel solutions is as creative as devising an experiment…or composing a tune or writing a poem. Mathematics—It appears that Platonist mathematicians more or less assert that Numbers are Forms, the Gods of the True Reality. It also appears that they are Satanists, who believe but do not worship. Thus the rest of us heathen need not be proselytized.
MisterMr 06.06.25 at 2:57 pm
@engels 23
String theory: things are delimited on many dimensions.
Algebraic topology: I don’t know what it is so it’s probably a communist plot, damn them commies they control algebra too now!
However, there is also the other option that the moon is not a “thing”, it is a complex phenomenon that yada yada: e.g. we could see space as a lot of particle-waves with different levels of density, why single ou the “moon” as if it was a thing? The moon is clearly a cultural construct!
But in practice the reasons we have to speak of the “moon” are such that we always will see it from the same point of view, so the relativism point might be ture but trivial, e.g. maybe alien entities who have completely different ways of thinking than us would not conceptualize the moon as such, but this is a point so irrelevant in pratical terms that nobody never makes it.
Tm 06.06.25 at 2:59 pm
„In my opinion, there is a difference, which is that “humanistic” disciplines deal with complex objects“
If science wasn’t able to successfully deal with “complex objects”, it would be pretty useless.
Alex SL 06.06.25 at 10:31 pm
MisterMr,
It seems you missed the discussion about whether Pluto counts as a planet? I don’t want to go in circles, so unless something new comes up I won’t repeat my argument beyond this, but:
Clarifying definitions is a different kind of discussion than testing ideas once the definitions are settled. But both kinds of discussion happen in STEM and in social sciences. Social sciences have more of the former IMO because there is more emotion and ideology in that, but that is a choice humans make, not an epistemological difference with STEM. But to expand on what Tm wrote, there are numerous topics in social sciences that are empirically settled, even as, similar to creationists in biology, certain politically motivated people reject the evidence.
Another complicating factor is that where social science research may inform policy, end-users of the research may have different goals. For example, if an economist were to convincingly demonstrate that 70% top marginal tax rate is optimal for funding the government, that would not impress a billionaire who considers a 0% top marginal tax rate optimal for himself. But that is a choice humans make, not an epistemological difference with STEM.