This is a somewhat modified transcript of a conversation between Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein on Academic Capture- meaning corrupting influences on science in the modern university.
The highlights are:
Science in Academia has been captured by the economic incentives at play.
Scientists and their research are responsible for large grants, which are lucrative to the university. This creates pressure to do only the kind of research that gets large grants, and creates pressures to come up with the conclusions that would keep the money flowing.
The work of the actual research is done by PhD students, who are granted degrees by participating in small areas of each study.
This keeps PhD students from seeing a bigger picture, and incentivizes them to produce what is wanted by the research.
The stature of research scientists in academia, as the ‘bread winners’ is such that they are often not required to teach or engage in governance, which has had a twofold downstream effect: insulating themselves from students who might ask questions that call out the larger scope, and removes them from governance, with the effect that more non-scientists are calling the political shots of the university.
So here are the comments. As I mentioned, this isn’t a pure transcript, I’ve cleaned it up in a few places to help readability.
Heather Heying
Lots of people are noting that Higher Education isn’t what it used to be and is helping to make fragile so many of the people who go through it. In fact, years ago, when the grievance studies papers [1] were being published, we noted that we see the bastardization of post modernism, and those people from the 90’s coming around to be faculty and indoctrinating, rather than educating, students, being a big part of what went wrong at Evergreen [2]. Almost all of the big, ridiculous kerfuffles on campuses seem to be about that. But what we said then, and what was harder to convince people of who weren’t in the sciences was, there was a different problem within the sciences, and it’s about the economic model of how scientists are funded, and institutions are funded by those scientists, therefore providing perverse incentives for those scientists to do big, expensive science. It has rendered scientists… not just people with PhDs in fields that probably shouldn’t exist, but many scientists, incapable of doing solid, careful evolutionary thought. Credentialism, people thinking ‘that person has a PhD in the science, so they must know what they’re talking about’, is rising. But too many people, credentialed with these degrees, were never expected to do a complete piece of research from beginning to end: to make an observation, to pose the alternative hypotheses, to figure out how you might address those hypotheses with predictions that are downstream, what the experimental design might be, or to go out and collect the data and analyze it and figure out what it means and reveal it and communicate it in speech and in writing. Many don’t experience that to get their PhDs. They walk into someone else’s lab, with someone else’s funding and someone else’s questions already on the table and they do a little tiny piece of the puzzle. Why do we expect people like that to be able to think broadly about the entire scientific process and to walk in and say ‘that doesn’t make sense’?
Bret Weinstein
When the grievance studies work emerged, we told them ‘the problem is you didn’t do this with the sciences also. As such, you can’t see there is a parallel kind of corruption within the sciences.’ The grievance studies stuff is particularly egregious, obvious, and transparently wrong. The problem is that the scientific stuff is cryptically broken. It’s not only that people have been awarded degrees for work that doesn’t actually make them experts in the way science is done because they’ve done too small a piece. That’s a common problem. But there is also an issue. The same reason people end up doing a small piece of work in order to get their degree is that there is an incredible pressure that has to do with the way the University is paying for its work by effectively by giving people degrees in lieu of money. That’s how it makes itself profitable. This creates an incredible pressure to do work that pleases those in position of authority in order to have any hope of getting a job. This creates positive feedbacks where some bit of conventional thought that owns your field is in a position to make sure that only work that emerges is what matches that school of thought and doesn’t challenge it. This is anti-scientific. Unless you’ve seen the effects of that corruption, it’s impossible to imagine.
HH
That truth about how science is funded preceded the rise of the grievance studies and the capture by them of many university administrations. Scientists are the money makers of universities- universities get a substantial overhead percentage of any grants that get brought in, and because of that, academic scientists are given the gift of not having to do some of the work they would have to do. Broadly, there are three things academics are expected to do: research, teaching, and governance; governance meaning everything from sitting on the committee that decides who is going to do the catering for your campus, to admissions, to hiring, to decisions about restructuring departments. IF the research scientists are bringing in the money, administration will minimize what they have to do in the other two camps. Fewer teaching responsibilities means less and less interaction with students, who are actually incredibly useful in terms of giving pushback. Much of student pushback may be naïve, but students can also give more sophisticated pushback because they don’t know what questions they aren’t supposed to ask.
But also…. by allowing the sciences to excuse themselves from governance, governance skews towards non-scientists and people in fields that aren’t making any sense at all. This means the grievance studies nonsense is downstream from scientists being captured by these economic forces.
BW
We can see the effect of capture within the academy, but it looks very different from places where lobbyists are persuading legislators to do things. Something observable in developing nations is that everyone is so pressed for resources that they are cheap to corrupt. A forester in Madagascar who makes 10k per year is supposed to prevent a corporation from logging tens of millions of dollars from his forest. It’s easy to persuade him to forgo the public interest if he can provide a better life for his family. He’s susceptible because of his low salary.
In academia, there is an incredible insecurity because there aren’t near enough jobs, so it causes people to be easily corrupted even if they don’t understand what they’re doing. There’s no bribe on the table, but there are other mechanisms.
The corruption of science is partly so destructive because it’s so subtle. It’s hard to even diagnose. Certain fields will be less susceptible. Astronomy perhaps has a more mundane corruption, whereas things get really bad as you get closer to medicine. The overarching impact of this corruption is to render the science feeble.
When talking about foreign policy, anyone can recognize there is such a thing as war profiteers: people that profit from, and work to push us into, wars because they personally would profit in such a scenario. Everybody knows that even if lives are at stake in wars, there are people whose perverse incentives might cause them to mislead us. Why can’t we accept that the same thing is at least plausible with respect to a pandemic? Could there be such a thing as a pandemic profiteer and if so, what are some things that they might have us do, that we shouldn’t do?
We’ve seen profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry in the past. We have seen advice make its way into the academic literature, and only later reveal that it was harming people. That profiteering could be happening isn’t shocking, the question is- how much of an effect IS it having on the public health advice? The public health advice is not making sense in some instances. Why are we vaccinating people that have already had covid? There isn’t a good answer to this and even the CDC’s answer doesn’t make sense. Is that ineptitude or corruption? Until we have an answer, the question of ‘how bad the rot is’ will persist. Whatever forces have us giving a vaccine we don’t know enough about to people who it will not benefit, is suspect. Why would we do that?
Notes
[1] The grievance studies papers were a series of papers by Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay submitted to academic journals specializing in cultural, queer, fat, race, gender and other study fields focused on grievances against society. They submitted a series of papers meant to highlight that only certain conclusions were allowed. So they wrote papers containing ridiculous or morally questionable means, but arriving at the ‘correct’ answers. Several were published in the relevant journals.
They became known as Sokol Squared, after Alan Sokol, who had written a hoax paper in 1996 to the academic journal Social Text, only to reveal later it was nonsense. He did it to expose that densely written, opaque nonsense could pass for academic insight in the post-modernist field as long as it contained the requisite buzzwords.
[2] Evergreen College in Olympia Washington is where both worked as professors until 2017. Evergreen had for some years held a ‘day of absence’, where students and staff of color would absent themselves to highlight their contributions to the school. But in 2017, the university changed and told white students to stay off campus. Weinstein refused this and challenged it, and this sparked protests by a subset of the students first demanding his firing, but proceeded to them hunting Weinstein on campus while the school’s administrator called campus police to stand down and not interfere with the students.