The Grandfather of Alt-Science
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Every talk at that conference was framed as a brilliant insight that was being suppressed by the scientific community. Highlights, by my recollection, include that climate change is false, radiation is good for you, and most alarmingly in my opinion that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Not surprised at all that Dr. Robinson has since got tied up in vaccine denial, and been extensively funded by the Mercers et al. Nor that he has since become a perennially losing congressional candidate in Oregon.
There's a great quote at the end of this article, in which he says that science is fundamentally a populist endeavor, and that one man can be right and all others wrong. I'd point out that science is also fundamentally a human endeavor, and that those who practice it cannot escape their own motivations or cognitive traps.
Perhaps Dr. Robinson and his crowd really are onto something the scientific consensus is blind to. But they're also creationists, climate deniers, and anti-vaxers. We know what cognitive biases drive people to those opinions, and we judge their research output accordingly.
The wonderful thing about research is that when enough research gets done, you can cherry-pick a research paper that will agree with any belief you hold. [1] If you then proceed to ignore all the results that contradict it, you have an unassailable position. After all, you're just a yet-unrecognized Leonardo.
That being said, the problem with alt-science (or alt-anything) is that inverting a biased paradigm simply yields another biased paradigm. These folks are just anti everything the mainstream of science is for. Let's say the mainstream is wrong with a 50% probability. In that case these folks will also be wrong with a 50% probability. They'll just be wrong in the inverse.
This is not independent thought. Every single conclusion they reach is in line with a political agenda. It just happens to be a different political agenda than the dominant one in most academic institutions.
This is also not an independent venture. Just as mainstream science must conform to a certain political zeitgeist to chase academic and government funding, these folks must also conform to a certain zeitgeist to chase funding from right-wing personalities like Robert Mercer. I highly doubt Mercer would fund an independent scientist who concluded that excess CO2 will likely cause climate change. Art's funding will dry up as soon as he reaches a conclusion Mercer doesn't like.
This also implies another huge problem with their worldview: They can't do original research. Not because it requires funding, not because the Men In Black will shut them down, but because the results of that research might be politically incorrect within the politics of the group that is doing it.
The field is sterile. All it has is anomaly-hunting, which looks like research until you realize how dishonest it is, and endless whining, a droning blare of outrage at the people who are mostly ignoring them and making a concerted effort to advance actual fields of study.
That's a really clear characterization of a whole range of "alt" fields. Anomaly hunting alone is basically scientific whataboutism, and as you say looks like research until you contrast it with the richness of fields where actual progress is being made.
Well, they're all very similar in outlook and methods.
First, there's reality.
Next, there's people attempting to understand reality, using honest technique and investigation and sound reasoning. That group is, with some unfortunate counterexamples, "The Establishment" inasmuch as an establishment can be said to exist: They're all looking at the same thing, reasoning about the same experiments, and, on occasion, running experiments of their own, so they're going to form a rough consensus about what reality is and how it works.
Now come the cranks, the alt-science crowd, who must reify that rough consensus into a unified and powerful conspiracy called "The Establishment" in order to justify their own inability to get taken seriously. Never mind that they never do work which is both original and worthwhile, no, it must be "The Establishment" preventing them from succeeding and being hailed as geniuses.
Honestly, I doubt the alt-science crowd is very unified, either. Some of them are honestly mentally ill. Others are completely sane but suffering from cognitive biases and, probably, enhanced egos, preventing them from being humble enough before reality to accept that the consensus is the consensus for a reason. Others are outright charlatans, the Kevin Trudeaus and the chiropractors and the homeopaths and the crystal healers, who would be impoverished were the FDA and FTC empowered to act strongly enough in the best interests of the population.
And most are merely followers, people who lack the knowledge and insight to do anything original but love the feeling that they're better than you, bucko, because they've seen through the lies and know better and did all of it without any actual mental effort on their part, without even having to be challenged enough to alter their intuitions about things. No, their intuition isn't wrong, the whole system is conspiring to make it seem like they might have to change their mind about something.
> Anomaly hunting alone is basically scientific whataboutism, and as you say looks like research until you contrast it with the richness of fields where actual progress is being made.
Anomaly hunting varies from missing the forest for the trees to insisting that the fact this specific tree looks to have minor bark damage means the whole forest is fake and the entire notion of plants must be called into question. It can look like a touching belief in the perfection of organizations (like, them getting all het up about recordkeeping deficiencies makes it look like they think organizations always keep the records perfectly in order) until you realize they're trying to nitpick away the Holocaust.
You're assuming that the establishment is looking at reality.
The cranks would contend that the establishment is itself deeply ideologically biased and is not looking at reality. This is probably true to an extent. The question is to what extent. I'm sure it varies by discipline and of course by establishment (there are more than one).
I think the proof is in the result. Ultimately I judge the success of a scientific field of endeavor by the engineerability of its findings. If a set of scientific ideas can be used to build something (in whatever sense that applies) then they almost certainly have some validity.
As a general heuristic, "discount all of a person's scientific ideas once you've seen them championing one howler" is fine. But if you think that your bullshit meter is calibrated well enough to tease signal from noise, there are autodidacts and non-institutional researchers who have good ideas or insights alongside their offputting HIV/AIDS denialism, Young Earth Creationism, Electric Universe-ism, or what-have-you.
But Art's past association with Pauling, combined with his charisma and rugged good looks are systematically used to provide top cover for a grievance-oriented movement of cranks.
It's exactly the veneer of respectability that Bob Mercer needs to put these guys in political power. The urinalysis is a red herring.
It is a bit more broad than that and a recent example was when I bowed out of offering an opinion and explicitly stated that I was unqualified to opine. Their response was that I was smart and they'd value my opinion anyhow.
So, it's a two way street and reinforced by external stimuli. In the example case, I'm a mathematician and don't know a damned thing about psychology. My opinions on it should carry no weight and my declination to opine should have signaled that.
Creationism is a metaphysical claim and is unlike the other two example you provide. One can point to isotope measurements, fossil records, etc. and still not make a dent in the final argument, which is "God made it that way". It may seem preposterous that God would make extensive fossil records, but that opinion isn't a scientific one but a philosophical or theological one.
This also is a metaphysical and philosophical position. It cannot be examined empirically. But it is one's prerogative to have that position, and I can understand why one would.
- anti-nuclear sentiment (1, 2)
- anti-wind sentiment (bad for birds) (1)
- blanket anti-GMO (2), overly focused on organic products
- homeopathy (2)
- overconfidence in some forms of birth control: condoms as actually used are only 85% effective (3) birth control per year per couple
- poor understanding, or at least wording, around prenatal development. Developed human fetuses are both human and alive. Scientifically, the abortion question isn't whether a human life is ended, it's clear that one is. The question is a philosophical (not scientific) -- whether the termination of a life is justified and who gets to determine that.
I expect that some of these sentiments could be very true. Just like storing up thousands of samples of urine could provide scientific advancement. But the discussion on each issue is not scientific. In some cases, scientific inquiry itself can be seen as dangerous and harmful.
(1) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-liberals-war-...
(2) https://newrepublic.com/article/139700/democrats-party-scien...
(3) https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom...
-It's first and foremost a profile piece of a man who is definitively right-wing and has major ties to right-wing donors and interests.
-It had a wary narrative on Pauling as well, who is clearly indicated as left-wing.
-It offers warnings about alt-science in general in the closing paragraphs.
> Pauling, who arrived there in 1968, was about to make a sharp left turn in his career, to pursue an alt-science theory of his own
Although Pauling was already well to the left.
People are complicated - clearly being a climate change denier seems like a pretty insane thing for an otherwise seemingly intelligent scientist to believe, but as the article mentions towards the end: Who knows, maybe the urine thing will be useful. There's no reason to dismiss it out of hand. I think using more nuclear power would be a good idea.
So much of today's rhetoric seems to want to paint people in black and white, but everyone's a mix. Even Trump has the occasional flash of not-complete-idiocy (although, to be fair, I'm having a hard time thinking of one).
> "I don’t know where she [Robinson's wife] got that disease, but my guess is that if we’d stayed in La Jolla, she’d still be alive. It would have been a different life. So I look at all this, and I know I’m lucky — I’ve got six wonderful young people working here, and they’re all brighter than me so I’m having fun. But she’s dead and the [urine] profiling was delayed for many, many years. So if I could do it over again …" He paused.
However, I am pretty skeptical on Robertson's approach to this, on several parts, but the most conspicuous is how his "alt-science" seems to be aligning a lot with modern GOP philosophies.
For example, while he explains plainly, "that human activity has not harmfully warmed the Earth", the article he participates in comes to a bit different conclusion, which is "Meaningful integrated assessments of the environmental impacts of anthropogenic CO 2are not yet possible because model estimates of global and regional climate changes on interannual, decadal and centennial time scales remain highly uncertain", which seems a bit dishonest to say the least.
Great article and fascinating read. Academia surely needs to be challenged, but I am afraid I would take more of Pauling's approach myself.
What an interesting quote. I've never considered science in this light but... it's true!
> populism
> noun
> 1. the political philosophy of the People's party.
> 2. (lowercase) any of various, often antiestablishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies.
> 3. (lowercase) grass-roots democracy; working-class activism; egalitarianism.
> 4. (lowercase) representation or extolling of the common person, the working class, the underdog, etc.: populism in the arts.
So no, I disagree that "only the first of those is correct".
Because of this, science is disseminated in the same way as religion, political action, superstition and gossip - an authority figure says something, and we take it as true. No differences. Same mechanism for all knowledge, correct or spurious.
Society has special mechanisms for science to be tested against reality every so often (especially through the PHD system of selecting authority figures). Knowledge from a 'scientific' authority is more likely to be based on objective fact than anything else. However, there is still massive scope for error, especially in what the public believes if something is mis-identified as a scientific fact.
I'm thinking things like dietary science. The public perception on what the science says seems to be somewhat malleable.
No and I don't think science is elitist either. Neil deGrasse Tyson said "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
Robinson gets it pretty much exactly wrong or maybe he just doesn't understand what populism means.
Like a lot of things NdGT says, this is ridiculous. Science is not "true" for any value of "true" that makes sense. It is a process, the results of which may or may not accurately describe truth as we know it today.
NdGT thinks he is making science cool with his pithy quotes and his one-liners on Twitter showing how smart he is, but I fear he is doing long-term damage on how difficult science really is, and what the sausage factory really looks like behind the curtain.
(Source: Am a scientist with published papers who can't stand the industry sometimes)
Just to be clear, if I may ask: do you believe NdGT is causing people to believe that science isn't difficult?
Especially when it comes to science this view is stupid: there is no scientific knowledge that is based on individual achievement. Newton already knew this: "standing on the shoulders of giants". In isolation, the smartest person in the world wouldn't be able even to start grasping what we already have in terms of scientific development, and the situation is even worse for scientists of the future. Exactly the same can be said of most technology fields such as computing. The whole idea that there is any individual merit outside of participation in the scientific and technological community is just baloney.
This doesn't mesh with the abortion issue. Or opposition to gay marriage.
Conservatism tends toward traditionalist communitarianism. There is a disdain for top down imposed collectivism but not for bottom up faith/family/community collectivism.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
aka "science advances one funeral at a time"
But of course the "entirely" is taking it way too far.
As far as politics goes, he did not pick a great district to try to run for. The incumbent, Peter DeFazio (D), is beloved in the area for his populist attitude and progressive voting record; the Eugene/Springfield/Corvallis/Albany metro population consists largely of aging hippies and college students, and he's been consistently elected since the 1980s.
verb literary past tense: ensorcelled; past participle: ensorcelled
enchant; fascinate.
Worth the price of admission for that alone
Here's a Feynman chasser/refresher on what science is. https://youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
... padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks.
I'm already not taking him seriously as a scientist. Who puts carpet in a lab? Any kind of lab, much less one that you're anything at all related to biology or chemistry.
Maybe they were referring to his office adjacent to the lab?