"Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing.
To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.
Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble.
Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena.
But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion.
Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths.
Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.
The story of how things got to this state is difficult to unravel, in no small part because the scientific enterprise is so well-defended by walls of hype, myth, and denial.
But much of the problem can be traced back to a bald-faced but beautiful lie upon which rests the political and cultural power of science.
This lie received its most compelling articulation just as America was about to embark on an extended period of extraordinary scientific, technological, and economic growth.
It goes like this:
Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.
“The free play of free intellects...dictated by their curiosity...”
READ on!!
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