Michael Abramowicz on The Volokh Conspiracy is concerned that constraints, social or otherwise, damages academic exchange and his ability to trust the work of other people:
[A tweet by Wil Wilkinson]: Let’s simplify everything by noting that basically everyone committed to liberal values agrees that some claims and topics fall outside the bounds of socially acceptable opinion and debate, but we disagree about what’s in and out of bounds and about appropriate social penalties.
Wilkinson insists that he favors free speech, in the sense that he believes that the government should not proscribe speech (outside of narrow categories, such as slander), but that all reasonable people exact social penalties for at least some speech. And indeed, while I consider myself as about as in favor of free speech as anyone, I can imagine some extreme statements that a dinner party guest might make (say, holocaust denialism or white supremacy) that would make me less likely to invite the guest to another party, in part because I am convinced that a person announcing such views is seeking to get a rise our of listeners, exhibits serious defects in reasoning ability, or has profound prejudices, or maybe all three.
The danger, though, is that once we accept that it is acceptable for there to be social penalties for making out-of-bounds claims, people who make claims that ought to be in bounds, maybe even claims that are correct, will be found to be out of bounds. Moreover, people will not make claims that they think plausibly might be out of bounds.
And the impact on the non-polymath?
The knowledge that thoughtful people are self-censoring troubles me, not so much because it will lead me to censor myself, but because it makes it much harder for me and others to generate justifiable beliefs. Most of what any of us believes isn’t based on careful reviews of the literature. I believe in anthropogenic climate change and have even written about possible remedies for climate change, but I have not personally reviewed the models that predict global warming. My opinion is based on the declared opinions of others, who themselves may not have reviewed all the relevant models but may well be friends or friends of friends of people who have. I am, in other words, engaging in an exercise in social epistemology, trying to determine what is a justified true belief based on the announced beliefs of others.
But this exercise is a lot more difficult when one suspects that certain opinions are self-censored. If hypothetical climate scientists who have a view that differs from the consensus feel that they are better off staying quiet, then it is hard for an outsider to know whether the absence of such statements is because the climate change evidence is so strong or because there has been an information cascade. (The concern can push in the opposite direction as well. Because government climate scientists worry about stating their honest views, I would not place much epistemic weight on a government report about the state of climate science.) I still feel that I know enough about the culture of academia to determine with high confidence that climate change skepticism is largely unjustified. But I don’t have a very good answer to someone who, engaging in his or her own exercise in social epistemology, concludes that climate change is a hoax. I could tell this person that 97% of published papers that express a position on anthropogenic global warming conclude that it is occurring, but I don’t have a good answer to the objection that papers that say the opposite won’t get published and that scientists who claim such unorthodox views will harm their careers.
And that’s certainly a problem when confronted by people who want full, complete, and static answers, isn’t it? That’s why scientists can be very detailed in their answers, and why people talking to scientists should always append, in their minds, Contingent on new data and new arguments.
In a contrary view to Abramowicz, I’d like to note that the human brain has limits to its processing speed and its bandwidth. Given the amount of scientific data being generated for sub-sub-specialties, it only makes sense that certain concepts are repressed at the source, and discarded without investigation at the recipients. In particular, this helps preserve bandwidth that would otherwise be eaten up by cranks with PhDs, who are typically operating outside of their expertise, such as Dr. Navarro of the Trump Administration, or have some sort of religious or ideological objection to a paradigm of their area of expertise. This has been seen in the area of evolutionary biology in which the devout of fundamentalist sects who object to evolution have obtained PhDs in relevant areas and then tried to produce scientific arguments against their target paradigm. I’m not aware of any success in the latter case, but their dubious methods and proposals surely waste the time of serious scientists.
But, at least within the realm of science, if not of academia[1], the processes of science should mitigate the problem over which Abramowicz worries. Science is about resolving open questions concerning reality, particularly those concerning paradoxes implicit in currently accepted theories. This is how Einstein resolved the question about the speed of light, as the theory of instantaneous transmission of light predicted certain phenomena which had not been observed. When paradoxes and other unexplained phenomena occur, hypotheses are proposed, tested, and either discarded or tentatively accepted.
Or, as Wilkinson suggests, they are ignored.
This happens in science. Two examples with which I’m familiar are the modern theory of plate tectonics and the bacterial theory of peptic ulcers. Neither were accepted when proposed, and took years of dogged persistence by scientists before they were accepted by the community.
And it was that dogged persistence and lack of successful competing theories which led to their acceptance. Science may drag its heels when it comes to exotic theories that are nonetheless correct, but it will – eventually – get there.
1 I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that science without numbers was just academics. Apropos of nothing.
