Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the best way to ensure the efficiency, accuracy, and accountability of a system is to put around ten or twelve people with no expertise relating to that system in charge of it, preferably if they underperform on their current responsibilities. Haven’t heard it before? Perhaps I phrased it oddly, that’s my fault. Let me try it again. A congressman from Texas is introducing a bill that will put the final say on the validity and accountability of scientific papers under the purview of the United States Congress. Does that make any more sense? Of course it does Or maybe I’m confused.
For those of you who are lost here as to why I’m flipping out, here’s a breakdown of the peer review process. You receive grant money. You party, because now you have a job. You enter the lab, trench coats in hand, and begin fiddling with test tubes and wrenches. Then you mix some chemicals around, smash a few atoms, have people take a few surveys, collect some delicious data, fill some spreadsheets, make graphs, drink coffee, sleep in the lab, make faces at the lab monkeys, achieve tenure at a university, hang out with grad students, and then write a paper about it. (There are some subtle nuances I’ve missed, I’m no scientist.) Now, in order to publish in the hallowed “peer review journals”, that process has to be repeated and critiqued by other scientists who do what you do and do it well. Thus, “peers”.
You see, before things were peer reviewed, your research fell under the purview of your patron or your dean. They got to decide if your work was valid and worth the time of the scientific journals they published. This lead to some of the findings tending to back up whatever the patron/school already thought, which is odd since patrons/schools are not often scientists. This got people thinking, “Hey, I’m seeing a pattern”, and they started to have it reviewed by peers in a blind manner. You had no idea who read your paper, tried the experiment out, critiqued it, and sent it back to be published or tried again or edited. This way, theoretically, someone who was your peer intellectually, but had no direct oversight in your work, would be able to say, “Hey, you missed a comma and eight moles of cobalt in your calculations you dimwit. The way you’ve written the formulas would probably get you killed if you used those measurements and then titrated.” That’s right, I know science words like “moles” and “titrates”. This peer would cause you to reflect on what you’ve done, correct your errors, and then re-submit and some other peer would blindly review your work and offer their critiques.
To get into why the congressman’s idea is just plain awful, let me explain something about human nature: no matter how unbiased we try to be, no matter how hard we try to eliminate our bias, it’s still there. If you know the validity of your paper is going to be judged by someone, and that someone holds the purse strings that determine whether or not you still have a career, your biases become worthless, but those of the fund givers will matter. What I’m saying is that if Congressman have the final say on the validity of your papers, you’re going to give him what he will deem to be valid, and it’s 1640s Venice all over again.
Now, for the fun part where I rant on and on about the guy who thinks this is a good idea. And while it seems like I’m randomly character assassinating someone, it’s my blog and I’m ok with that. His opinions of science are important. So let us go down the rabbit whole of promised cynicism, you’ve all waited long enough!
First of all, the dude’s a “Christian Scientist”. Not a scientist that practices the Christian faith. This means, amongst other things, he believes that the only true reality is the spiritual and that anything material is an illusion. So, that’s great. Really, anything that science studies, by his religion, is an illusion. That’s a pretty high view of the material so far, I’m liking where this is going. They also believe that Jesus never actually died, but was fully conscious in the tomb and regenerating. Kind of like going super sayan. Much like Scientologists, they do not believe that illness is anything but “error” or “incorrectness” and is best treated with study and prayer, not things like antibiotics and Advil (my ibuprofen of choice). Evolution is just our shifting perception of reality, barely more than a figment of our imagination and that there was no big bang. So, I really wonder what they do about things like particle physics. I’m cherry picking here, but these are some of the more interesting ones.
So, technically he believes you should eschew medicine, reality is illusory, and evolution just another thing in a long line of things that we’ve made up about reality that looks real, but is illusory. This is they guy we’ve got suggesting that we should hand over the keys of our scientific journals to Congress. Of course he does, he thinks science is a illusory and misguided down to the core of it’s existence! Which is baffling since his stance on science (found on his web site here) is that science is our guide to a brighter future and that we should allow technology to expand our lives insofar as that it still protects our privacy. Woah, wait, hold on, he sponsored CISPA and SOPA. I am so confused right now, it’s not even funny.
So, a man who subscribes to an ideology, which contradicts his stated beliefs and ideology, is interested in having the people who pay for the grants that scientists live on have final say on the validity of a study that they know next to nothing about, which most assuredly will not affect the scientist’s attempted lack of bias in favor of those who govern them? I’m not terribly surprised, he is, after all, a congressman.
WiZ 