What's bugging you, Mr. Science?
Eugyppius shares an insight into the wormwood of the academic-industrial complex:
Following the Science would be inadvisable even if we had some semblance of science. Instead, alas, we have a massive, overbuilt, over-enrolled university apparatus that primarily caters to the careerist concerns of students, researchers and teachers. It is a factory, not of free inquiry, but of conformity. Participants in this charade pantomime disagreement and discovery, but almost nobody ever says anything new or interesting.
An important point and given too little recognition in these later days of the Cult of the Expert.
Real science (lowercase s) is a human enterprise, done by human beings, working in human institutions.
That doesn’t mean real science is flawed in the way that, say, mass media or politics is flawed.
There’s a real and valuable different between science, properly understood as an ideal of inquiry and disciplinary practice, and most everything else humans do.
The human-ness of science does mean we all should be hyper-vigilant against the fallen sinfulness of human beings intruding there.
And boy does it ever.
The pressure to conform, to join with the group, to do what you’re told no matter how irrational, nonsensical, or contrary to good sense, is a powerful pull whenever you bring humans together in numbers.
The more universities become like factories, with more managers, more bureaucrats, more paperwork, more meetings, more rules, more petty hall monitors, more office politics, the more conformist it becomes and the less real work gets done.
Scientists themselves, who ought to be ahead of the curve on this, are as a class strangely mute about this process.
The whole point of the job is to criticize, test, and when necessary revise the status quo. Ironic as it is, none seem more clueless, even hostile, about than the careerist academic. They do not want to hear it. The “Smug” dial flips to 11 as they smugly explain how their spineless conformism is actually based on facts and good science.
Over-specialization (another flaw of the factory-university) creates smart, intelligent, well-trained professionals who are world-class experts in a silo one inch wide and a mile deep. This doesn’t exactly promote critical thinkers, much less the kind of generalists and revolutionaries that were responsible for most of what you and I know of as “the history of scientific progress”.
From a comment of mine:
It's funny that we've gotten to this stage given that the history of science is most notable for its revolutions, triggered by radical (often disagreeable) thinkers. Every major figure from Galileo onward gets painted (rightly or not) as bravely standing up against a closed-minded status quo.
In the same way most every major thinker about the methods of science has come to a similar conclusion. From Bacon and Hume to Popper, Quine, and Kuhn, the need to test, criticize, and overthrow claims that are by nature provisional and epistemologically fragile has been the essence of the whole activity.
The whole thing has shifted on its base from exploration and criticism to a cult of careerists.
Meanwhile the IFL Science! crowd who worships these fat bureaucrats in labcoats will go on to tell you why it's totally scientific that you wear three masks and take four barely-tested mRNA shots.
No university today could turn out a Galileo, Darwin, or Einstein. (Whatever you think of them in actual historical terms, they are the mythic figures in the story of The Science, so this is an instructive detail.)
The good news: There are clearly many, many disgruntled scientists and ex-scientists who see through the lie and want nothing to do with it. That’s excellent news.
The bad news: The universities now select for personalities most likely to be weak-willed conformists. As a result they will continue their decline into woke cesspits of conformist virtue-signaling as little more than vocational schools for a shrinking number of profitable skills useful to the woke cesspits of conformist corporations.
The kinds of radical breakthroughs that the IFL Science! brigade gushes over are a distant memory. What’s done as science now is largely incremental tinkering with existing theories. As eugyppius mentions, this is all but inevitable due to the dysfunctional incentives.
Real creativity and innovation are all but dead.
For as long as this situation lasts, we’ll be blessed by mediocrities with grant money and well-paid public relations agencies — such as NZ’s own Pink Wonder and Michael “Mask ‘Em Up” Baker — intruding into our lives as state-accredited Experts.
One of my guiding stars through this meltdown of the last few years has been Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned in Democracy in America that the creative energy of individualism leaves us vulnerable to the tyranny of majorities.
That’s more true than ever in today’s large organization, whether it’s a government ministry, a university department, or whatever’s left of news agencies. The more “free” we become, the more conformist pressure we experience.
That’s the tragedy of the libertarian position. The pull to be absolute different becomes the push to absolute equality, which leads to absolute tyranny.
Even though they are devoted, on paper, to the ideals of progress and impartial inquiry, in the real world the institutions of The Science have no more resisted this systemic rot than HR departments in Silicon Valley.