In this two-part post, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges of doing revolutionary science. (See Part 1 here.) I’ve argued that revolutionary science — the practice of questioning the core principles of an accepted theory — is difficult for a simple reason. To do it, you must fight the instinct to conform.
Conformity is the glue that holds human groups together. It’s what underpins the rule of law and the norms of trade. Even more fundamentally, conformity is what underpins our ability to communicate. To speak to one another, we must conform to common rules of vocabulary and syntax. It’s called speaking the same language.
While conformity has many benefits, it can sometimes be a problem — especially when doing science. Conformity is driven by cultural evolution, which cares only for what wins (where ‘winning’ means one culture beating another). Science, on the other hand, is concerned with the truth. So we have a disconnect. Successful forms of conformity can be based on ideas that are false.
How do we uproot false ideas? That’s where the revolutionary scientist comes in. The revolutionary scientist challenges entrenched conformity, often at a steep personal cost.
In this post, I recount the difficult lives of a few revolutionary scientists. And I discuss some career tips for doing revolutionary science in a hostile world. But first, I’ll explore a metaphor for what it means to do science.
Science and culture
If you’re like me, you tend to think of science and culture as separate beasts. ‘Science’ is the dispassionate search for facts. ‘Culture’ is the passionate transmission of rituals and traditions. The two don’t really mix.
As a scientist, I find this dichotomy appealing. It means that I can separate my scientific research from the messy world of ‘culture’. And artists, no doubt, take similar comfort. This dichotomy means they can separate their cultural work from the rigid world of ‘science’.
While the dichotomy between science and culture is comforting (at least to me), I’ve convinced myself that it’s untenable. I blame evolutionary theory for this change of heart. The problem is that in evolutionary terms, ‘culture’ isn’t some subset of practices that are ritualistic and traditional. Instead, culture is every idea and learned practice that is transmitted across generations. So evolutionary theory tells us that science is … part of culture.
This merger of science and culture may seem, at first glance, like a victory for post modernists. Science, they’ve long said, is just one type of culture. And, they continue, all cultural “ways of knowing” are equally valid. So science has no privileged access to the truth.
Just thinking about this post-modernist mantra makes my skin crawl. Fortunately it’s still bullshit. Yes, science is part of culture. But it’s the only part of culture that gives access to the truth. If you want to know how the world works, you must test your ideas against evidence. That’s the cultural ideal of science, and it’s the only way to discover the truth.
So on the one hand, placing science within culture changes little about how we think of science. It’s the search for truth. But on the other hand, insisting that science is part of culture changes how we view scientists themselves. Scientists aren’t dispassionate outsiders. Instead, scientists are actually shaping culture.
Think of scientists as arborists.
Our would-be scientist is perched at the top of a tree, pruning shears in hand. The tree is human culture — past, present and future. The trunk of the tree is humanity’s deep cultural inheritance — the practices like language that are shared by all humans. The smaller branches are more recent cultural inventions — things like agriculture and urban life. At the top of the tree are the buds — the ideas and practices that, if left to grow, will form the branches of future culture.
The scientist’s job is to prune cultural buds. As each bud begins to grow, the scientist looks at it with scrutiny. “Is this idea or practice consistent with evidence?” the scientist asks. If it’s not, the scientist nips the bud before it grows. By doing so, the scientist ensures that the tree of culture grows in a way that respects the truth.
That’s the hope, anyway. The reality is that science doesn’t always work. Sometimes the arborists nip the wrong bud. When they do, a branch of culture starts to grow that’s based on ideas that are false. As the branch thickens, we run into a problem. Most scientists continue their job of pruning new ideas. They sit on the false branch of culture, nipping new buds. What these bud nippers don’t do is look at the branch on which they sit. They’re blissfully unaware that the branch is rotten.
To fix this problem, we need a different kind of scientist. We don’t need cultural bud nippers. We need a cultural lumberjack. The lumberjack doesn’t care about new buds. Instead, they care about the rotten branch on which they sit. To remove the rot, the lumberjack grabs a chainsaw. With one fell swoop, they lop off the branch of culture.
In this metaphor, our bud nippers are ‘normal’ scientists. They take accepted theories and refine them. Our lumberjacks are ‘revolutionary’ scientists. They take accepted theories and throw them in the dustbin of history.
Taking the metaphor further, we can see why doing revolutionary science is difficult. Cultural lumberjacks chop down cherished ideas. They chop down other people’s life work. They chop down a whole branch of culture. Unsurprisingly, others react with vitriol. To be a revolutionary scientist — a cultural lumberjack — is to pit yourself against a whole society. And the odds are you will be punished accordingly.
Punishing revolutionary scientists
With our lumberjack metaphor in mind, let’s look at some sordid history. Let’s look at the punishment doled out to revolutionary scientists of the past.
Galileo Galilei
When it comes to the persecution of revolutionary scientists, Galileo Galilei springs to mind. Today we celebrate Galileo as a father of modern astronomy. But during his lifetime, things were rather different. Galileo was a vocal critic of the (false) geocentric model of the solar system, and a supporter of the (correct) heliocentric model. Although the evidence was on his side, Galileo’s views conflicted with church dogma. As a reward for his revolutionary science, Galileo was convicted of heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Ignaz Semmelweis
More tragic (but less well known) is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a father of modern infectious disease theory. Working in Vienna’s general hospital in the 1840s, Semmelweis discovered something startling. When doctors delivered babies, the death rate was 3 times higher than when midwives did the same job. After scrupulously looking at all the possible causes, Semmelweis found the culprit: dead people. As well as delivering babies, the doctors also did autopsies. The midwives did not.
Semmelweis correctly concluded that there was something on the cadavers that transmitted infection. Unfortunately, this discovery wasn’t heralded as a revolution in science. Instead, it was ridiculed. Why? Because it conflicted with medical orthodoxy. At the time, most doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance in the ‘four humours’. And so their response was to balk at Semmelweis’s ideas. Faced with steady ridicule, Semmelweis suffered a mental breakdown and was treacherously committed to an insane asylum. There he was beaten, and (ironically) died of septic shock.
John Yudkin
You’ve probably never heard of John Yudkin, but future students of nutrition will likely learn his name. He was one of the first researchers to identify the dangers of eating sugar.
If you’re over 40, you probably remember the low fat craze of the 1980s. It was based on the work of Ancel Keys, who claimed that saturated fat led to heart disease. The problem was that there was never much evidence to support this claim. Indeed, decades of low fat dieting haven’t put a dent in heart disease.
Enter John Yudkin. In 1972, Yudkin published a book called Pure, White and Deadly in which he argued against demonizing saturated fat. The dietary bad guy, Yudkin claimed, was sugar.
To support his claim, Yudkin martialed many lines of evidence. Heart-attack victims, for instance, tended to consume more sugar than the general public. And people with tooth decay are also more likely to develop heart disease.
While this evidence is important, Yudkin’s most compelling argument against sugar wasn’t epidemiological. It was evolutionary. Organisms, Yudkin observed, are adapted to eat the foods in their diet. But (and this is key) adaptation takes time — evolutionary time. So when an organism first discovers a new food, it may well be harmful. But given enough time, adaptation will render the food nutritious.
After being stated, this idea is so simple that it appears obvious. And yet it profoundly changes how we think about food. It means that the nutritional status of a food has nothing to do with the food itself. Instead, it has only to do with the time the food has been in our diet. The longer we’ve been eating something, the more likely it is to be nutritious. Conversely, the newer a food is to our diet, the more likely it is to be harmful.
This evolutionary argument exposes a flaw in the saturated-fat-is-bad hypothesis. Saturated fat is found mostly in meat. The problem is that hominids (human ancestors) have been eating meat for literally millions of years. That’s plenty of time for adaptation. So while eating meat may have caused health problems for our ancient ancestors, it’s unlikely to do so for us. We’re adapted to eat it.
But if meat isn’t bad, then what is? To see, Yudkin looked at our dietary clock. Meat, he observed, has been in the diet for millions of years. Starch-rich carbohydrates have been in our diet for about 10,000 years. And refined sugar? It’s been in our diet for 200 years. That’s an evolutionary blink — no time at all for adaptation.
Based on this reasoning, Yudkin argued that sugar is a dietary bad. (Today his case continues to grow.) But despite his impeccable reasoning, Yudkin was almost completely ignored by the nutritional community. By the time Yudkin published his book, saturated fat had been enshrined as the dietary bad. And so Yudkin was labeled a ‘crank’ and ignored.
Thorstein Veblen
To conclude our foray into the sordid history of revolutionary science, we’ll look at the life of the political economist Thorstein Veblen. For my money, Veblen was the most important American social scientist of the 20th century. He founded the institutional school of economics, which focused (as the name suggests) on institutions rather than individuals. Veblen also made seminal contributions to how we understand corporate capitalism.
True, Veblen’s theories aren’t definitively correct — nothing in the social sciences is. Still, Veblen stands out as a revolutionary thinker — someone who was willing to sacrifice his career in search of the truth. And he paid dearly for it.
After getting his degree, it took Veblen 7 years to find a university position. And once he found a position, he soon made enemies. (His habit of sleeping with colleague’s wives didn’t help.) Summarizing Veblen’s life, Martha Banta wrote that it was a “compelling narrative of how not to succeed in the conventional ways of the world”. As a fitting end, Veblen died as an outcast in a California shack.
Doing revolutionary science in a hostile world
As these sordid histories show, doing revolutionary science often means enduring great punishment. Still, some people are stubborn enough to do this job. If you’re one of these people, here are some strategies for doing revolutionary science in a hostile world.
Strategy 1: Find a safe space
To the outside observer, revolutionary scientists may appear to be lone wolves working in total isolation. But this is rarely true. Usually, revolutionary scientists are part of a small community of like-minded rebels. This community is a safe space for doing revolutionary science — a place to share ideas and get constructive criticism.
As an example of this type of safe space, I’ll use my own training as an economist. As a committed critic of neoclassical theory, I would have found it crushing to study in an economics department. Fortunately, I studied in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. There I found a safe space to pursue my own ideas, no matter how crazy they were. The thesis that I ended up writing was about as far from economic orthodoxy as you can get. I couldn’t imagine trying to write it in an economics department.
So if you’re a budding revolutionary scientist, I recommend searching for a safe space to do your work. It will benefit your research. And more importantly, it will keep you sane.
Strategy 2: Be a Trojan horse
If you can’t find a safe space, here’s another way to do revolutionary science: lie like your pants are on fire. This is the Trojan horse maneuver. It works as follows.
Although you’re a revolutionary scientist at heart, you pretend to be a member of the rank and file. You slavishly profess the accepted theory of your field. Your goal is to convince the academic orthodoxy that you are one of them. If you’re successful, you’ll get a university position and eventually get tenure.
Then you reveal the ruse. With tenure in hand, you suddenly profess revolutionary ideas. Your colleagues are horrified. But there’s nothing they can do. You’re a Trojan horse that’s already inside the city gates.
This Trojan-horse ploy makes a great story. But it’s a rare person who has the guile to pull if off. I know of only one economist who’s managed the feat — Stephen Marglin. He earned tenure at Harvard by promulgating neoclassical bullshit. But once tenured, Marglin dropped a bomb. He publishing an essay called “What Do Bosses Do?”, which argued that hierarchy is unnecessary for production. Instead, the purpose of hierarchy is to give capitalists control over workers.
Marglin’s colleagues at Harvard were, of course, horrified by his change of course. But there was nothing they could do. As a Trojan horse, Marglin was already inside the Harvard gates.
So if you’re a revolutionary scientist who is willing to engage in Machiavellian deception, take heed of Marglin. He showed that it’s possible to do revolutionary science by running a long con.
Strategy 3: Work outside academia
If you can’t find a safe space and you don’t want to be a Trojan horse, another option for doing revolutionary science is to work outside academia. You get a day job and do revolutionary science on the side.
A quick look at history shows that this route is quite common. Einstein developed special relativity while working as a Swiss patent clerk. Karl Marx published Capital while working as a journalist. Baruch Spinoza published his philosophy while working as a lens grinder. And David Hume worked as a tutor and librarian. Many revolutionary scientists, it seems, have had non-academic day jobs.
While we often romanticize these stories of geniuses in the rough, the truth is that this double life can be grueling. Einstein, for instance, worked at the patent office 6 days a week, 8 hours a day. That left little time to do physics. And as a struggling journalist, Marx lived a life of poverty. To make ends meet, he repeatedly had to pawn his overcoat. The problem was that this overcoat was his ticket to get into the Reading Room of the British Museum. So to do his research, Marx had to buy the overcoat back. (I thank my friend James McMahon for telling me about this story.)
So yes, it’s possible to do revolutionary science from outside academia. But it’s unglamorous work.
Strategy 4: Crowdfund your research
A final option for doing revolutionary science — one that has become available only recently — is to crowdfund your research. Rather than appeal to universities to fund your work, you appeal to the general public.
The caveat here is that the general public must be interested in your work. For many revolutionary scientists, this won’t be the case. I doubt, for instance, that crowdfunding would have helped Einstein create General Relativity. Few people knew that Newton’s theory of gravity was inadequate. And even fewer people would have been interested in Einstein’s approach. So if you’re working in an obscure branch of knowledge, crowdfunding your research probably won’t work.
Things are different in the social sciences, especially economics. Many people understand that mainstream economics is bullshit. (Public trust in economists is abysmal.) So if you want to do revolutionary economics, it seems that the general public is on your side.
If you’re interested in this approach, look to Steve Keen as an example. He’s the first economist (to my knowledge) to successfully crowdfund his work. Keen’s success is one of the main reasons I’ve started to crowdfund my own research. Time will tell how successful I am.
As with any approach to doing revolutionary science, crowdfunding has its pitfalls. It means you have to devote a significant amount of time promoting your research. And you need to communicate your findings to a general audience. Lastly, the crowdfunding universe is incredibly unequal. Almost all the money goes to the top 1% of creators. So don’t expect to automatically earn a handsome sum through crowdfunding. A few lucky folks do. Most people don’t.
Why do revolutionary scientists exist?
I’ve focused here on the challenges of doing revolutionary science. To do it, you must fight the human instinct to conform. Given this instinct, it’s surprising that we have revolutionary scientists at all. If there’s little social payoff for non-conformity, why would you ever do it?
Obviously human nature has many dimensions, and conformity is just one of them. People also have a burning desire to understand cause and effect. Why else would we tell elaborate stories about the weather, the seasons, and the cosmos. We want to know what causes these things.
Which instinct wins out? I’d say that in most people, conformity wins out most of the time. That’s why ‘alternative facts’ are so easily spread. But in a small number of people, the desire to understand cause and effect trumps conformism. These are the revolutionary scientists. Who knows why they exist. But we should be thankful that they do.
[Cover image: Luis Quintero]
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I have to add my favourite revolutionary scientist to Charles Darwin. I think he was in a similar situation of feeling that old ideas weren’t satisfactory explanations (bullshit) any more, many people of the time, including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, were convinced that animals had evolved over time (evidence from geology of an old earth and of many extinct species as fossils).
So the foundation of the old theory (gods creation in 7 days) was shaky. Darwin too felt that finding a mechanism for such evolution (a better theory) was needed to win the case, but I wonder if that mechanism, natural selection, was the clincher? Or rather, the voluminous evidence he accumulated to show that the old just idea wasn’t tenable. He took that evidence to the general public too, and achieved a paradigm shift.
In Darwin’s case he worked inside academia, but outside of it too from his home, and maybe funded by marriage to his wealthy first cousin Emma. A good solution.
Yes Darwin stands out as a revolutionary scientist. But like Einstein, Darwin was lucky enough to have his ideas accepted (by scientists at least) within his lifetime. Had he been working a century earlier, he probably wouldn’t have been so lucky. It helps to live at the right time in history.
I heard a story of a now very successful novelist who started as an academic, but decided on a change. He worked on his first novel while supposedly doing research (within an Department of Environmental Studies). A combination of the safe space and trojan horse strategies.
[…] Continue to Part 2 […]
While all of this feels like an assessment of revolutionary science that is correct, there is one thing that keeps bugging me: economics isn’t science in the sense that it is seeking “truth” about the natural world. Econ is about human behaviors, free will, and societal organization, not the natural laws that lead to those things. Any attempt to reduce it to behavioral evolution is going to fail for a number of different reasons. Yes, we need to smash neoclassical economic theory – which amounts to little more than propaganda for one’s preferred economic outcomes – but economics really is politics. (discussions of how to divvy up resources)
I know what you are trying to do is move past this, but having the humility to admit that economics is inherently messy and uncertain would be the most revolutionary idea in economics for some time. Keep up the good work, there’s a lot of great ideas here!
Hi Alex,
I agree that there are no ‘natural’ laws that explain human behavior. But that’s not quite the same as saying that human behavior can’t be studied scientifically. For instance, there is no ‘natural’ level of inequality. Inequality is a social choice. Still, I’d like to think that this choice (and its consequences) can be understood scientifically.
I also agree that economics is inseparable from politics. That’s why I refer to what I do as political economy, not just ‘economics’.
Blair (in comments): “Inequality is a social choice. Still, I’d like to think that this choice (and its consequences) can be understood scientifically”
I agree with Alex. I made a similar point several months ago since when I have been silent. I think that you need to separate three basic concepts:
Science (or, better, existing engineering): an objective description of a system based on observation and measurement. For example, humans organise teams as hierarchies. Successful teams take over unsuccessful teams. The leaders of successful hierarchies become powerful. This is true of armies, churches, governments, businesses, and all sorts of other teams It has been true for thousands of years. Science may also include analogies to other systems to identify common patterns. For example, the human body uses the nervous system as a hierarchy that allows the brain to co-ordinate the actions of the arms, legs and other extremities i.e. there is already evidence in nature that hierarchy is efficient. See also, telecoms networks and travel networks which use hub and spoke designs
Engineering (or proposed engineering): an alternative system design based on observation and measurement, including evidence that it works. For example, an alternative way of organising teams
Politics: a value judgement between alternative system designs. Value judgements combine what is true and what is important. Importance is subjective and is often concerned with morality and ethics.
The biggest problem with mainstream economists is that they pretend that their value judgements are science. For example, CEOs are worth their salaries because they are more productive. In my judgement, that makes mainstream economists either dumb (if they do NOT know that is what they are doing) or conmen (if they DO know that is what they are doing).
The problem is that you are doing the same thing. The only difference is that you are making different value judgements. CEOs are NOT worth their salaries. You also imply that hierarchy is somehow bad and should be avoided. That is another value judgement that you are using to support your value judgement about CEOs. You are also not proposing a viable engineering alternative.
I said to you previously that I do not know anyone who takes academic economists seriously. That is because you ALL pretend that your own value judgements are science.
As you say, inequality is a social choice. The amount and nature of inequality is a value judgement. It is not science. Slavery and not slavery are choices. Women in the workforce and woman staying at home are choices. Children in full time education and children cleaning chimneys are choices. Retirement at 60 and working until you die are choices. Natural death and euthanasia are choices. Democratic decision-making and technocratic decision-making are choices.
Politics involves a society making these choices. Different societies make different choices. Individual societies make different choices at different times. There is no “scientifically correct” answer.
PS Revolutionary science powered by individuals such as Newton or Darwin is indicative of primitive science. Modern science has evolved to teams working in hierarchies e.g. physicists researching basic particles at Cern; chemists and biologists researching new drugs. The absence of teamwork in modern economics is a heuristic assessment that economics is a primitive subject. Finally, society requires scientists to demonstrate TO THE SATIFACTION OF SOCIETY that scientific innovations are effective and safe e.g. electricity in the home, nuclear power generation, new drugs. Economists do not understand that either.
Hi Jamie,
Lot’s to respond to here. I think we agree about many things. But I do disagree with this comment:
I don’t think I’ve ever said this … at least not in those words. I try hard to avoid using words like ‘worth’. What someone is ‘worth’ (or not worth) is clearly a value judgment. Yes, I do think that CEOs are payed too much. But that’s because I’m against inequality, not because I think they’re paid more than they’re worth. I’ve never said that … and never will.
Thinking in terms of ‘worth’ is one of the cardinal sins in economics. Neoclassical economist try to show that everyone is paid the value that they create. Marxist want to show the opposite — that capitalists (and CEOs) are paid more than the value that they create. This is a huge mistake, because it’s impossible to objectively show either assertion.
I’m trying to show neither of those things. I’m looking at a regularity in pay. It increases with the number of subordinates. Whether this is good or bad is a value judgment. I agree that there is no scientifically ‘correct’ value for CEO pay (or for anyone else’s pay). I never said that there was.
Finally, you and I have very different views about what science is about. You take a utilitarian view:
I’m all for useful inventions and useful knowledge. It’s just that it’s almost impossible to predict what ideas will be useful and what ideas will not be useful. So it’s short sited to use this criteria to judge science. Who could have know, in the 1930s, that quantum physics would form the foundation for computing. When it was created, quantum physics benefited nobody. By your criteria, it should have been abandoned.
Yes, we agree on some things. I would not comment otherwise. However, we have major disagreements too. I think that we agree that economists use the word “value” without any clear meaning. However, I also think that economists use the word “science” without any clear meaning.
Blair: “I do think that CEOs are payed too much. But that’s because I’m against inequality, not because I think they’re paid more than they’re worth”
Science does not care what you believe. You are against inequality. So what? That is a value judgement. Why do you mention it? Why is it relevant to science? I am not sure that any economics deserves the word science, as it is full of such judgements. However, as a minimum, we need to distinguish science engineering and politics as per my previous comment. Economists do not do that. Let us lower the bar and ask merely for objectivity. You do not assess hierarchy objectively.
Your theory seems to be that hierarchy is a bad thing associated with capitalism. That is a judgement already. It is also wrong. As I said before, hierarchy is just an attribute of the organisation of teams. People have organised as teams for millennia. Hierarchy has been proven to be an efficient organising principle. I downloaded your PhD thesis and did a word search for “team”. You do not use that word. It is as though hierarchy is an independent concept that emerges from nowhere. That is not an objective assessment. And you do not propose any alternative engineering principle for team organisation either.
You often draw analogies with nature and evolution. However, as I pointed out before, the human body can be thought of as a hierarchy with the brain at the top level. Evolution has not favoured a body where the arms and legs have an equal vote on how the body should behave. They do what the brain tells them. I suggest that there is a clear evolutionary reason for this. A more democratically designed body would lack the focus to pursue a common purpose or the agility to respond effectively to threats. Hierarchy is better. Same with teams.
Further, equality is not an important organising principle in nature. Survival of the fittest is the rule of nature. The lion eats the lamb. The strongest lion in the pride has their choice of mate. Even if you could reset nature (or human society) to support equality, inequality would break out immediately afterwards even if just due to chance and luck, never mind differences in skills and aptitudes.
Free markets are primarily free from regulation, not necessarily free for individual participants. It is the lack of rules that causes these markets to resemble the survival of the fittest regime. You can argue that equality is a more civilised organising principle than free markets, but do not pretend it has anything to do with nature or evolution or science. It is an artificial principle that is imposed on nature by humans.
We might also ask what economists mean by equality? Do we mean equality with other humans in the same country or across the globe? What about equality with other animals? Is it just financial equality or other types? For example, why is it fair for some people to live in rich countries while others live in poor countries? Most left-wing economists do not answer even this basic question on the scope of equality – never mind setting out how it would be achieved. We would need to define equality more precisely before we could discuss it objectively.
Blair: “When it was created, quantum physics benefited nobody. By your criteria, it should have been abandoned”
You have misunderstood my point. I am not saying that scientists cannot study things that are not useful. I am saying that society will not accept that something represents science just because a few scientists say so. Certainly, society will not implement an application of science just because scientists say so. That is what happens. It is not what I believe.
Regarding your particle physics comparison., that is a terrible comparison for economics for several reasons.
First, particle physicists study phenomena that are beyond the experience of other people. Non-physicists have no opinion on particle physics. That is not true with hierarchy or, more broadly, with economics.
Second, there are limited implications of the study of particle physics for other people. Life goes on as before. It is only when science is applied to society that other people get interested. Hence, there is a big difference between pure and applied science. There is no such thing as pure economics. All economics is relevant to wider society. It is all applied.
Third, society accepts new scientific innovations only when scientists convince the rest of society that the science works; that the benefits outweigh the costs; and that the risks are worth taking. Drug development is a good example and a much better comparison for economics.
Finally, physics is one of the great human achievements. Economics is not. Comparing advanced physics and economics is not credible.
Back at hierarchy, it is not clear that economists know anything about hierarchy that is not already known to many other people. It is not clear why the term “science” should be applied to the study of hierarchy by economists. That same question arises in many other areas of economics – running a business; producing goods & services; trading in markets; running a bank; designing and implementing policy; the impact of climate change.
You need a definition of science so that you can be held to account for living up to that definition. Science is not anything that you say that is not completely made up. What is your definition of science?
My definition of science is “holding ideas up to the scrutiny of empirical evidence”.
You are right that economics, as currently practiced, is largely unscientific. That’s because the (1) economists ignore evidence that contradicts their theories (2) they design their theories to be irrefutable.
I am not saying that knowledge in the social science is as robust as in physics. It never will be. Still, it doesn’t mean I’m not doing ‘science’ when I study hierarchy. I go to great lengths to find empirical evidence. Do I know exactly what causes this evidence? No. But so what? The first step in doing science is gathering the evidence.
Blair: “I go to great lengths to find empirical evidence”
Lots of people do this, both inside and outside academia, but they do not claim that their research is science. I spent my career in business and government solving operational problems using empirical evidence. Two points.
First, I think that I picked up from somewhere that you read Sabine Hossenfelder’s physics blog. So do I. Here is a quote from a recent post by her.
Sabine: “science does not say anything about what we should do. What we should do is a matter of opinion, science is matter of fact”.
Economists, including you, constantly confuse the evidence of what is with what we should do with that evidence. What we should do is not science. What we should do is politics. We all have biases that point our politics in different directions. Economists who claim that their biases represent “science” or “truth” are conning themselves and/or everyone else. As a result, anyone who disagrees with your view of what we should do will reject your evidence as well because it is coming from a biased source.
Second, science is about ALL the evidence – not just some evidence picked to support a specific bias. For example, you wrote a recent post about workers going on strike. There are pros and cons to striking. You present only the pros. You ignore the cons. That is not objective. It is the cons that explain why striking has mostly died out as a tactic.
If you want to be an advocate for a certain point of view, or for certain policies, go ahead. Advocacy is an ethical pursuit. Lots of great people have made their name on the back of advocacy. You write well and you do support your point of view with evidence. However, advocacy admits its own bias. It is not science. Even as an advocate, you should think through the evidence-based arguments of your opponents, even if just to be able to counter them.