The problem with science

is that so much of it simply isn't

Jay Bhattacharya is one of the few heroes to emerge from that society-wide misadventure we call “Covid”. A professor of health policy at Stanford, he was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. It urged adherence to longstanding pandemic plans that emphasized the isolation and protection of the most vulnerable, rather than locking down society at large. He also conducted, with colleagues, the first seroprevalence study of the virus that causes Covid, in nearby Santa Clara county. It revealed that infection was widespread. This was crucial information, as it indicated that, despite widespread infection (estimated by them at 53,000 people), the vast majority of people were not having a significant enough health crisis to show up as a “confirmed case” (of these there were 1,200). This gave us a measure of how dangerous the virus was.

For these contributions, Jay was attacked by every organ of the Government/ Big Science complex that meters out status and funding to its own loyalists. Fauci and Francis Collins, in private emails, called for a smear campaign against him and a handful of other “fringe epidemiologists” at backwater, fringe universities such as Harvard and Oxford. His own institution of Stanford hung him out to dry. Yet he never backed down, and has been vindicated on every particular. He is a plaintiff in what is likely to be the most consequential free speech case in recent history, Missouri v. Biden, which is currently headed to the Supreme Court. It alleges that “federal government officials violated the First Amendment by ‘coercing’ or ‘significantly encouraging’ social media companies to remove or demote content from their platforms,” including true information about Covid that was inconvenient because it would have lessened the sense of crisis.

I recently recorded a conversation with Jay, which I have embedded below. In it, we take a dive into the sociology of science, trying to piece together the reasons for the sorry state of scientific integrity during the pandemic. We also consider deeper problems with the practice of science, long predating the pandemic, that have been revealed by the ongoing “replication crisis” in field after field. The prevalence of self-protecting “research cartels” explains some of this, but the problems are more fundamental. The title I have used for this post comes from the first line of the best account I have read of the replication crisis, an article from 2016 by William A. Wilson. He begins, “The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t.”

Jay and I are both old enough to remember the “science wars” of the 1980s and 90s. This was a time when the academic Left loved Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as it emphasized the human element of scientific practice. It was invoked in a debunking mode by people in the humanities, to puncture scientific claims to objectivity. Meanwhile, humanists on the academic Right deplored Kuhn and his followers as “relativists” who didn’t believe in the idea of truth. The Right defended a naively Whiggish view of the history of science as one of steady, uninterrupted progress. The whole debate was idiotic. Today, the political valence of sociology of science has been reversed, with the Left insisting one must “believe in Science” and refrain from noticing its human fallibility, while the populist Right emphasizes not just the fallibility of science, but its tendency to groupthink and outright corruption. To understand this reversal, one has to grasp the function that Science as a form of authority (as opposed to science as a mode of inquiry) has come to play in our society.

As authority, Science is invoked to legitimize the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest. During the pandemic, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterized as “anti-science”.

One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly governed by this device. An emergency “state of exception” is declared to renew acquiescence in a public that has grown skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise. And this is happening across many domains. Policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation. In this way, epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people.

Jay was designated one of the bad people. He also happens to be a delightful human being, unfailingly reasonable. Give a listen as we try to make sense of the recent catastrophe. As always, thanks for reading, and for supporting the work of those of us offering “minority reports” against the consensus-borg.

Anatomy of the consensus-borg

Speaking of which, be sure to check out Jay’s own Substack, The Illusion of Consensus.