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| Does this pointer make me look sophisticated? |
Seth Roberts said that science is like single ants wandering around looking for food. His point was that science relies on randomish discoveries by individuals rather than a collective process of solve-the-riddle-by-committee.
I’ll quibble: Science is like an ant carrying a piece of food back to the nest and then a committee of nerdy ants swooping in to analyze it to death.
Science, people forget, has two parts. The rigorous testing and analyzing of ideas is one of them, and that’s the one that gets all of the attention, but the first and arguably more important part is the speculative and often casual generation of ideas to test.
I think Seth’s ant analogy is great for describing the generating ideas part. Single ants wander out in search of food, sometimes randomly, but typically informed by past successes or pheromone trails of other ants. If they’re lucky, they stumble upon a decent-sized and relatively edible piece of food. But then once they bring it back to the nest, hoo boy, here come the nerds.
These ants are amazing critical-thinkers. It only takes a few of them to expunge all life from an idea. It doesn’t take them but a few pointed questions to find faults with the forager’s sampling technique, for example.
The ants seem to take a peculiar pride in examining the idea from every angle, as if they earn status points for every blemish they identify. The ants want to subject the idea to magnifying glasses, statistical tests, and repeated trials. They are determined to find blemishes. Their status depends on it. If they don’t find (m)any blemishes, they assume they haven’t looked hard enough. More tests!
What most of the ants don’t seem to realize is that food is for eating, not analyzing. The question is not whether an idea is valid, but whether it is useful, whether and to what extent it contains calories and nutrition. And you can’t know that until you take a bite, until you try it on.
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I suspect that the fundamental problem with science is that, for most people who practice it, it is a profession.
- Professions are based on status.
- Status is based on seeming smart and sophisticated.
- Seeming smart and sophisticated is based on criticism of others’ work and using fancy, complicated methods for your own.
The result is a proliferation of barely-readable and barely read publications, an overemphasis (to put it mildly) on accuracy and testability, a dearth of “fringe” ideas (for fear of losing reputation points), and perhaps worst of all, an education system grounded in critical-thinking.
Food is for eating, not analyzing. We should be asking whether ideas are useful, not true. Our ideas – our theories – are not descriptions of reality but simplifications of reality, and it is precisely that simplification – that imperfection – that makes theories useful.
The sad part is that as long as science is (mostly) a profession, ideas are going to be presented unintelligibly and they are going to be analyzed to death, because status and promotions are won through fanciness and identifying faults, not through identifying usefulness. The sadder part is that the forager ants know that, and they have their own reputation to worry about, so the ideas they bring back to the nest are going to be relatively “safe.” And by “safe” I mean uninteresting, unrevolutionary, and close to paths other ants have already traveled.
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Boy this post is a downer, isn’t it? I invite and encourage you to tear it apart, because I’d like to feel some optimism about this.
To be fair, status-seeking probably encourages scientific progress in some ways, like more publishing and more clever experiments, but I think those advantages are pretty minor. I maintain that status-seeking is, on the whole, poisonous, and the main reason is because it switches the emphasis from simplicity and usefulness to fanciness and accuracy. (And in doing so it puts science almost exclusively in the hands of nerdy elite who have titles behind their names and who get their panties in a wad when their unintelligible papers are reported in newspapers in a way that might suggest their conclusions actually mean something.)
Assuming status-seeking is the problem I make it out to be, what’s the alternative? Would it even be possible to reduce or eliminate status-seeking?
Yes it would. Two examples:
(1) Fund scientists with vested interests in discovering useful answers. For example, someone with Crohn’s Disease is going to be much more motivated to find useful solutions than some pointy-headed researcher who is high-mindedly evaluating the accuracy of every little theoretical detail in order to avoid losing status points. (There could be some perverse incentives with this, but I’m ignoring that for now.)
(2) Give more Macarthur-like grants, but on a much larger scale. Identify creative “geniuses” and give them a hefty sum of money over a long period of time, where the money comes with no strings and cannot be revoked for any reason except if the scientist is being a lazy bum. That would allow them to search for whatever answers they wanted in whatever ways they wanted, and since they don’t need to worry about having their grant renewed, they’d be less concerned with impressing their colleagues or clients.
These are testable hypotheses, by the way. This ought to at least be tried on a small scale to see if scientists with vested interests or scientists with big, Macarthur-like grants result in considerably better (more useful) scientific output.
I’m betting it would. And if I’m right, then there is something seriously wrong with the way we currently do science.
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Another problem with science: Causes are hard (impossible?)
