Science needs critics, not cheerleaders

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Durham, North Carolina

When Professor John Staddon read the statement to the community regarding anti-racism sent by the president of Duke University this summer, he was alarmed. President Vincent Price has pledged to demand anti-racism and prejudice training for every member of our faculty, students and staff. To Mr. Staddon, it looked more like indoctrination than an academic investigation. He responded in an open letter.

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Mr Price said: As a white person, I cannot begin to fully understand the daily fear, pain and oppression that is endemic to the experience of black people. Reply from Mr. Staddons: Your reassurance is indeed an expression of empathy. Guess you’re feeling better, and maybe your African American audience, too. But feelings are different: unless the discussion can move from feelings to facts, no harmony is possible. Empathy, guilt, and good intentions are a dubious basis for radical resolutions.

Mr. Price said the hard work that lies ahead requires the community to take transformative action now to eliminate systems of racism and inequality. … It begins with personal transformation and … must end with institutional transformation. Mr Staddon countered that this phraseology will strike much more like psychotherapy or a call for religious conversion than a political prescription. What are these systems of racism and inequality? How did they affect Duke and how is Duke involved in it? Or are they societal concerns and therefore the responsibility not of a university but of government, church and civil society?

This is not the first time that Mr. Staddon, 83, a great American of English descent, has challenged the dogma of his peers. A professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology, he is a sort of modern Cassandra, warning for more than three decades of corruption in academia by political activists. As America awakens, its scholarly critiques sound like prophecies.

But Staddon is a scientist, not a political brand. He does not exchange opinions on opinions, but challenges his colleagues to answer the question that has long been the foundation of Western thought and science: How do you know what you know?

In an interview at his home in Durham, Mr Staddon recalls an episode which reflected this problem. An anonymous reviewer of his 2017 book, Scientific Method, a broad defense of the verification process rebuked him for exposing the problems of contemporary science. My reviewer felt that science is currently under attack, so anyone writing about it for the general public should do their best to defend it, Mr Staddon recalls. Science, of course, should need no defense in a society whose existence depends on it. But when science is not healthy, it does not need to be shouted out but to understand and improve. Science is strengthened not by praise but by criticism.

While Mr. Staddon has touched on the problems of the hard sciences, he is more interested in the vexed problems of the social sciences, where weak science competes with militant political tendencies around thorny issues of race, class and gender. In a forthcoming book, Fact vs. Passion: Science in the Age of Unreason, he writes that many social scientists find it difficult to separate fact from faith, reality from the way they would like things to be. Many research topics have become taboo, which means that policymakers make decisions based more on ideological political pressures than on scientific facts.

Mr Staddon has challenged the work of leading social scientists, including Duke sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whose books include Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. If color blindness, the MLK ideal, is itself racist, Mr Staddon wrote, we are in an Alice in Wonderland world of endless racial strife.

Mr Staddon is particularly troubled by the concept of implicit prejudice, which argues that subconsciously beliefs about social groups perpetuate racism, so that basically we are racists no matter what we do or even think. He notes that the primary measurement mechanism, the implicit association test, fails the most basic criteria of reliability and validity. Yet it is still widely administered to the hapless employees in many institutions across the country.

He is also skeptical of institutional or systemic racism, an idea born in 1967 with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther movement and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, then passed through the publishing factories of academia into the mainstream. The term, notes Mr. Staddon, is hardly ever defined. The best effort he has seen is that of the UK government’s influential 1999 Macpherson report, sparked by the murder of a black teenager. It defines systemic racism as the collective failure of an organization to provide appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnicity. Because that’s the key word. But now systemic racism is most often used as a synonym for any kind of racial disparity, no matter what its cause.

Of course, racism exists in America, as it exists almost everywhere else, Mr Staddon says, but the idea that differences in outcomes between racial and ethnic groups can be explained by a factor that is fundamentally unmeasurable is the opposite of science, which seeks, or should seek, to identify the real causes.

The politicization of science, he says, is not limited to race. Not so long ago, notes Staddon, homosexuality and gender dysphoria were considered symptoms of mental illness. Not that I disagree, the change simply shows how often so-called scientific psychiatric diagnoses are subordinated to cultural imperatives.

He knows such comments are provocative, but they shouldn’t be. These are just facts, he said. And a fact is only a fact; it doesn’t require you to do anything. David Hume, an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, recognized this when he distinguished between is and should. The emotions that facts elicit, questions of power and so on should not prevent you from studying the facts. Checking the truth of something should come long before you fret about it.

Especially since he ventures into the problems of the third rail, Mr. Staddon seems intrepid. But his attitude is rooted in a scientific background that was far from the fray. After moving from England to the United States in the early 1960s to pursue a university education at Hollins College in Roanoke, Va., And later in the Harvard lab of behaviorist BF Skinner, Mr. Staddon spent decades to study how pigeons, rats, lemurs and other animals learn, producing six books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles. Animals are more amenable to controlled experiments than humans, for ethical and other reasons, he says. They set a high standard for me to judge human studies, where the problem is more complex, the constraints much greater, and our level of certainty accordingly much less.

His interests broadened during the 1990s when he was asked to edit the Duke Faculty Newsletter. The university, especially its English department, then headed by Stanley Fish, author of the notorious book Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech: And Its a Good Thing Toow, was trying to take the humanities scholarship to the forefront of technology. To learn more about their thinking and host a dazzling publication, Mr Staddon attempted to recruit his colleagues to debate each other.

He had few takers. I would publish an article critical of, say, the postmodern idea that there is no objective reality. There was only one faculty member willing to write a response to such reviews. Usually no one was willing to answer, he said. This seems to be a key characteristic of my more forward thinking colleagues. They are not prepared to defend their ideas. Social science fields, in particular, have facilitated avoidance by becoming subdivided. The American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association each have over 50 divisions. What you have are little enclaves, filled with people who uncritically approve of the work of others and increase their number of quotes, a collection of circular massage teams.

Yet, he says, my personal tipping point regarding the uses and abuse of science came about two decades later, when I discovered that despite massive publicity to the contrary, smoking didn’t at no public cost. His 2014 book, Unlucky Strike: Private Health and the Science, Law and Politics of Smoking, argued that smoking saves society money because the elderly need more resources than the young and smokers die faster and more cheaply than non-smokers. Smoking puts individual smokers at risk. It does not endanger public funds. It is a private health problem, not a public one.

He also reviewed the scientific literature on second-hand smoke and found little evidence of serious harm, although the risks of second-hand smoke were used to justify banning smoking in most public spaces. After I published an article that addressed this problem, he says, I was contacted by a co-author of a massive passive smoking study, with clearly negative results, which I had cited which attested to the fact. that he had been deliberately neglected. , and also by a psychologist colleague who sent the manuscript of a concordant book on the subject which he had abandoned for lack of publisher. Tobacco control policy is motivated more by politics than science and criticism of public opinion is not welcome.

The political outcome may be defensible for utilitarian reasons discouraging a habit that is dangerous for those who participate in it and unpleasant for those who do not. But the corruption of science has its own price: many people know these things. Those who do not are made needlessly fearful and those who come to be suspicious of medical science. Until we can identify the exact physiological and biochemical causes of these afflictions, until we know who is at risk and who is not, the medico-political establishment should remain silent, or at least curb his nanny instincts.

These distinctions may seem academic to some. Mr Staddon says they are, in the best sense of the word: science is the search for truth, which is often elusive. When we lower our standards to pretend we know what we don’t know, we decrease work and misinform society.

Mr. Zane is a columnist for RealClearPolitics and editor-in-chief of RealClearInvestigations.

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