Science is political - and that's a bad thing
Science Fictions Substack | Stuart Ritchie
“People who say ‘science is political’ usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them.” Ritchie debunks arguments supporting the inevitability that ‘science is political’ or that it’s “good” for science—he offers a better way.
“After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things - but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying ‘Science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!’ is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity…”
“At best, by repeating ‘science is political’ like a mantra…[it’s] engaging in the usual social conformism that we all do to some extent. At worst, …[it’s] providing active cover for those who want to politicise science…”
“If you explicitly encourage scientists to be biased in a particular direction, don’t be surprised if you start getting biased results… If you encourage scientists to focus on the ‘greater good’ of their political ideology rather than the science itself, don’t be surprised if the incentives change… If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?”
Ritchie then offers a better way—”The answer is to get as far away from politics as we can.” He then offers ways to do this.
“We really should aspire to disinterestedness… The ideal scientist shouldn’t care whether an hypothesis comes out one way or another.The view that scientists should do their best to be as objective as possible is a boring, default, commonly-believed, run-of-the-mill opinion. It also happens to be correct.”
