The “hurtful” idea of scientific merit—WSJ

MeSci said:
Eh? I don't follow. I thought that Dawkins was a goodie.
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Dawkins is complicated. He is opinionated on many issues and is vicious to anyone who disagrees with him on anything. There are plenty of evolutionary biologists and atheists who find his dogmatism unhelpful.

I don’t know if he has said anything about ME. Like many crusaders against woo, though, he is a staunch believer in the placebo effect. And it would not be surprising if this has taken him down the same psychosomaticiser-friendly path as the likes of Ben Goldacre.
 
I've read the Journal of Controversial Ideas article - it's a piece of moral philosophy and that's fine, it isn't strong on evidence and a lot of the references come from the usual suspects (Helen Pluckrose et al), sources include Quillette and circularly the WSJ. I haven't gone through all 27 authors but they are predominantly white, male and either European or anglophone, there's a strong odour of "people who are not like me are getting grants that I think only people like me should get".

The WSJ diatribe is by just two of the 27 CI article authors and pretty much hijacks the CI article, it would be interesting to know how the other 25 authors feel about it. The WSJ sub head "Ideology now dominates research in the U.S. more pervasively than it did at the Soviet Union’s height." is not asserted in the CI article although it does introduce the false comparison of Lysenkoism - a canard that has been much used by the critical (race) theory = Marxism and is destroying American academia brigade. I think the WSJ article is a pile of manure, but then the culture war is designed to encourage the taking of sides.
 
Shadrach Loom said:
I don’t know if he has said anything about ME. Like many crusaders against woo, though, he is a staunch believer in the placebo effect. And it would not be surprising if this has taken him down the same psychosomaticiser-friendly path as the likes of Ben Goldacre.
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Kind of ironic since the belief in Somatization / Psychosomatic illness is based upon faith and not science.
 
Shadrach Loom said:
Dawkins is complicated. He is opinionated on many issues and is vicious to anyone who disagrees with him on anything. There are plenty of evolutionary biologists and atheists who find his dogmatism unhelpful.

I don’t know if he has said anything about ME. Like many crusaders against woo, though, he is a staunch believer in the placebo effect. And it would not be surprising if this has taken him down the same psychosomaticiser-friendly path as the likes of Ben Goldacre.
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Am I right in thinking he is the one behind ‘the selfish gene’ book which pushes the idea of Darwinism survival of the fittest, being selfish good, type thing?
 
Further, reality based scientific communities must be open to conceding and correcting errors. The ability of science to self-correct—one reason that scientific truth claims are uniquely credible—can be epistemically contrasted with conformity to religious and political dogmas, which are disturbingly closed to self-correction. Self-correction is facilitated by pluralism to maintain intellectual diversity and maximize the chances of uncovering provisional truths. Intellectual diversity ensures vigorous skeptical
vetting of scientific claims by a critical mass of doubters who ultimately accept being bound by objective truths once they have been rigorously determined by extensive evidence.
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True. But "alternative ways of knowing" (the target of the article, i.e. epistemologies focused explicitly on social justice) don't have a monopoly on bad science. The "Emperor's New Clothes" incentives created by universities and grant bodies can make mainstream science just as unsound as science produced by a political agenda. The call is coming from inside the house.

The diagnosis in this article has symptom and disease the wrong way round. Politicised science has not caused the weakening of scientific self-correction. The flourishing of both vanity science and politicised science is a consequence of the failure of the structures which are supposed to provide self-correction.

If the authors really want to shore up merit in science, they should tackle the most fundamental problems in the academy: too little reward for peer review, too many mates reviewing each others' work, quantity over quality, hyping of research on social media, too much focus on (short-term) societal impact and on news coverage, and (worst of all) the rarity of retractions - or any consequences at all - for even plainly misleading or unethical work. All of which problems are about to get so much worse as AI increasingly writes, summarises and reviews scholarly papers, modelling itself on the deluge of mediocrity published by low-ranked journals.

Whatever AI-led model emerges from the ashes of the traditional scientific method for evaluating research in the future, we must hope someone remembers to code into it not only logical rigour and statistical analysis, but also unshakeable ethics and a healthy amount of scepticism - all characteristics which seem to be currently scarce among both generative AIs and university management.
 
bobbler said:
Am I right in thinking he is the one behind ‘the selfish gene’ book which pushes the idea of Darwinism survival of the fittest, being selfish good, type thing?
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The phrase “survival of the fittest” is something of a millstone round the neck for Darwinists: it means the organism best suited to an environment, not the physically fittest specimen.

I rather like the idea of selfish genes, making humans the accidental by-product of a selection of components competing for dominance.

The only post-Darwinian I can think of who explicitly argued that being selfish was good was Nietzsche, and even then he was probably trying to say something epistemological or metaphysical by analogy. And he was utterly barking.
 
Shadrach Loom said:
The phrase “survival of the fittest” is something of a millstone round the neck for Darwinists: it means the organism best suited to an environment, not the physically fittest specimen.

I rather like the idea of selfish genes, making humans the accidental by-product of a selection of components competing for dominance.

The only post-Darwinian I can think of who explicitly argued that being selfish was good was Nietzsche, and even then he was probably trying to say something epistemological or metaphysical by analogy. And he was utterly barking.
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Oh I'm aware of its original intention in Darwin's actual writing but where I saw it most quoted of recent years was indeed wrong-usage e.g. in newspaper comment sections from people from certain ideologies used just as you note: to infer probably best to let the weakest struggle etc.

It's a bit weird that I have just looked this one of the selfish gene book up, just after looking up co-opertition and cartels (inspired by post before yours): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense (at the level of the genes) it makes for them to behave cooperatively with each other.

A lineage is expected to evolve to maximise its inclusive fitness—the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy. The book also introduces the term meme for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human culture, in a different sense. Memetics has become the subject of many studies since the publication of the book. In raising awareness of Hamilton's ideas, as well as making its own valuable contributions to the field, the book has also stimulated research on human inclusive fitness.[1]
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A reminder of his term 'meme' too. I can see how this could go a few different ways with him
 
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