A couple weeks ago we discussed the ridiculousness of the government mandating so-called gold standard science while at the same time promoting fraudulent, debunked, and flat-out fake research. We followed up the next day with another example.
A new plan from NIH
Since then I came across an interesting new development of a more positive kind. The director of the National Institutes of Health writes:
We’re working to remove ideological influence from science. NIH funding must be based on provable, testable hypotheses, not ideological narratives. Projects that don’t meet that bar are discontinued so we can focus on rigorous, impactful research.
I don’t think we could or should remove all ideological influence from science. The people who care about a topic enough to research it will often have ideological motivations. The ideological influence is there. That doesn’t mean it’s bad science.
Consider the field of criminal justice. I once talked with someone who was doing research on criminal justice who was, for ideological reasons, in favor of privatized prisons. Another time I worked with a colleague on a project involving the death penalty, which, for ideological reasons, he opposed. (I supported the death penalty at the time, but I have to admit that after completing that research project, my views changed: I continue to support the death penalty in theory but I don’t support it in practice, at least not how it’s done in the United States.) Anyway, my point here is that . . . this is fine. In some fields, ideological motivations and influence are unavoidable; the topic is still worth researching, and we just need to evaluate it carefully. Here’s another example, this time on the politically-charged topic of international economic development aid.
This does not mean that I think that we should let ideologically-motivated bad research off the hook. For example, the study discussed here seems useless to me, and I’m guessing that it was political ideology that got it published in Lancet. And don’t get me started on this story.
That said, I’m generally supportive of the NIH policy to reduce, if not to work to fully remove, ideological influence from science. Oftentimes it seems that ideological narratives are positively encouraged, as in the series of papers published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology that I criticized a few years ago: these were absolute junk and seem to have been constructed and promoted as part of an ideological project. Or that whole Implicit Association Test debacle. I’m not proposing that NSF necessarily give zero funds to such research–ideas can sometimes be revived–but, yeah, if they do fund it, it should be because it ultimately can improve health, not just because it fits an ideological narrative.
I’ll just add one more technical comment, which is the “provable, testable hypotheses” thing. Lots of hypotheses can’t be proved but there is still value in partial knowledge. Indeed, I have a problem with the whole attitude of expecting certainty from science: this leads to a roller-coaster of hype and disappointment. So I’d recommend removing the “provable” bit from that phrase. For most of science, “proof” is a snare and a delusion.
How does this fit in with the junk science being promoted elsewhere by the government?
The National Institutes of Health are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the head of that department has been promoting junk biological science such as, most notoriously, a discredited paper on vaccines and autism. They also released a report on children’s health that was full of fake citations. Others in the government have been promoting unsupported claims of widespread election fraud. All of this is ideological narrative, the opposite of “testable hypotheses” or “rigorous research.” Unfortunately, much of this junk science seems to have been “impactful” on policy, but impact is a bad thing if it’s unsupported and debunked claims that are making the impact. Indeed, this is a well known problem with bad science, that it can remain impactful long after it’s been discredited.
I can’t blame the director of NIH for the behavior of his boss at HHS. I do think there’s an awkward tension between the NIH attempting to remove ideological influence from science at the same time that its parent organization is putting ideological influence into public health decision making.
I don’t know how this gets resolved: maybe the executives at HHS are too busy with politics to worry about what’s happening inside the NIH? For political reasons, I’m guessing that the NIH director won’t call out the junk science being promoted by his boss. I do that sort of thing at Columbia, as here and here, but I’m just a statistics professor, not a political appointee. It’s gotta be a tough position to be running NIH, trying to remove ideological influence from science, while dealing with a boss who’s chest deep in the stuff. A difficult balancing act for sure.
P.S. Also I’d appreciate it if the NIH director corrects his misrepresentation of what I wrote. I mean, sure, I know he’s too busy to do this, indeed I would not want him to be spending his scarce time on something so minor. But the NIH employee who posts to that twitter account could issue a post with a quick correction and apology? It would only take a couple minutes, right?
Removing ideology from research does not sound like a good idea to me. It seems mostly impossible – unless the research is about a subject that nobody cares about. Anything important should have ideology involved – it is part of the human condition. So, I suppose the real objective is to separate the ideology from the science – to clarify what the science says from the ideology. That should impact how research is reported and consumed, but I would hope not what subjects are actually researched.
The more skeptical side of me believes the reality is to remove particular ideologies and promote others. That appears to be a consistent theme of this administration. And that would not separate ideology from science – it would only replace one with another.
Ideology-based research could be done well or done poorly. I don’t believe it is the presence of ideology that determines that, so I think it is the wrong target if we want to improve research practice. I’d rather see directly addressing ways to improve research (such as moving away from NHST and binary thinking towards appreciation and reporting of uncertainty) rather than attempting to remove ideology. I think it is analogous to issues surrounding ideology in university teaching. Many administrative comments appear to believe it is bad for university professors to have an ideology. It leads to the nonsensical notion that every viewpoint needs to be equally represented in teaching. Instead, it is the use of ideology to stifle or penalize alternative viewpoints that should be the target of these concerns.
I’d be happy with a sort of “ideological conflict of interest” statement in which authors declare their own biases and priors on the subject matter. Of course they would have to be honest in doing so, but at the same time if someone like Peter Navarro or Gabriel Zucman said “I have no biases that could be potentially coloring the methodology or results of this analysis” everyone would roll their eyes.
I’m not sure what “ideology” even means. So I looked it up… and my conclusion is it’s a kind of worb ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3valcuAqMA and his entire YouTube channel is fantastic )
Here are some example definitions from around the web:
1) “An orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation”
2) “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual group or culture”
3) “Sociologists define ideology as “cultural beliefs that justify particular social arrangements, including patterns of inequality””
4) “In political science, a political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, offering some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order.”
How about the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy which says:
5) “The uses of the word “ideology” are so divergent as to make it doubtful that there is any conceptual unity to the term. It may refer to a comprehensive worldview, a legitimating discourse, a partisan political doctrine, culture, false beliefs that help support illegitimate power, beliefs that reinforce group identity, or mystification. It is often used pejoratively, but just as often it is a purely descriptive term.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ideology/
In any case, based on these ideas it’s completely impossible to remove ideology from science, since science is itself an ideology by all these definitions. Good science’s ideology is something along the lines of “the way the world works can be found out by hypothesizing mechanisms and rules to describe the way the world works, and then carrying out experiments in which we change conditions to see if the predictions and outcomes are in agreement”
But even if you stick to “political ideology” (ie. decision making ideology), one must decide what kinds of things to study, and who will have the resources to study them. When you do those things, ideology necessarily enters. If we consciously make a decision then we’re using “ideas” that “characterize our thinking” about which things should or should not be done then there’s an ideology involved.
Even “we should choose grants by cryptographic random number generation” is an ideology.
Whenever a politician says they want to “remove ideology” all that means is they want to erase some out-group from having a say. Erasing out-groups is right-wing politics writ large.
“Erasing out-groups is right-wing politics writ large.”
We can’t all be as tolerant of out-groups as woke/cancel culture. (Remind me again what percent of the left was openly advocating, supporting, and applauding political assassination in the last election?)
If you’re having trouble understanding “ideology” and need a good example of the reductio ad absurdum they often reduce to, a good place to start is the anarchist community.
Anon:
Unfortunately, lots of people of different political persuasions advocate, support, and applaud political assassination–at least when it is done to political figures of other countries. See for example here and here (“The American officials briefed about the assassination plan in Washington supported it, according to an official who was present at the meeting”).
Support for political assassination within the U.S., that’s another story. I would guess that a very very small percent of the left, right, or center was openly advocating, supporting, and applauding political assassination in the last election. Not zero because nothing’s zero.
Woke cancel culture is right-wing politics as well. The problem is that the meaning of left and right, the only meaning that actually makes sense out of the terminology, has been actively obscured for propaganda reasons. Left means being in favor of equality of decision making power and democracy, right means being in favor of hierarchical decision making and dominance. Again, great explanation on the What is Politics podcast/video series with explicit historical receipts to show that this is always what the terms meant for ~130 years or so from the french revolution to early 1900’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3uevocEy3c&list=PLU4FEuj4v9eAU706Cz_fCvcG44pNow14Y&index=5
right wing politics is about dominance hierarchy, and so “cancelling one group” and putting another group in power is again right wing politics, again the same guy addresses this explicitly in the below video (within the first 2 minutes). the appeal to an authority to cancel someone for saying the wrong thing or acting the wrong way is 100% a hierarchical mode of operation because of the role of the authority involved. The purpose of cancel culture is as an attempt to change who is at the top of the hierarchy, not to dismantle the hierarchy.
Somehow I doubt you’ll watch the video, but if you can just get through the first 2 minutes you’ll see how to make sense of right vs left with respect to cancel culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyAnOMTY2Lo&list=PLU4FEuj4v9eAU706Cz_fCvcG44pNow14Y&index=10
The issue that causes the confusion is that the Bolshevik revolution was a right-wing phenomenon which used the rhetoric of “socialism” to seize power. The Nazis also used socialism as rhetoric (National Socialists party). But of course in power they both created a hierarchy and reproduced typical right-wing structures of power where “the people” had absolutely no power and all the benefits accumulated to the top party members etc.
For propaganda reasons, post-war, the USSR was referred to as “the left” by the US but that is basically one hierarchical form of government (US) pointing at another hierarchical government (USSR) and demonizing them with a word that was being intentionally distorted both by the Marxist-Lenninists (to claim legitimacy within their country) and by the west (to demonize the USSR). There’s a special word to describe people who had been duped into supporting the USSR because they though it was a socialist country. They’re called “Tankies”.
Also, all the attempts at assassination of Trump came from people with a record of supporting and voting in favor of the Republican party. Historically, the Stalinists explicitly murdered the Spanish Anarchists they had supposedly aligned with in the Spanish Civil war. They had no interest in a non-hierarchical popular movement succeeding.
A lot of people are confused about their political position because it’s **actively obscured** by propaganda.
If you are in favor of a market with lots of small businesses, a government that doesn’t actively aid the formation of monopolies, widespread prosperity with limited income inequality, ownership of businesses by individuals, small groups, or cooperatives, eliminating non-competes, reduced regulations designed to preference incumbency, a system of finance that doesn’t automatically make an elite wealthy… then you are a LEFT leaning person. (but most people would mistakenly think of all this as *RIGHT* because it’s the rhetoric that the right coopted in the 80’s but never actually did any of that)
If you think that government should provide special treatment to large businesses and their owners, actively suppress wages, make it hard for small businesses to get started or compete with large businesses, utilize finance mechanisms to transfer wealth from individuals to owners of stock, create barriers to entry such as patents and copyrights, actively support the wealthiest people in society, use the “Military Industrial Complex” to funnel resources to wars and the people who supply arms (or in more recent times, Palantir and the surveillance industry)… then you are right wing.
I doubt very much that Anonymous is a right winger, I think he’s just been duped in the same way that I was duped until I literally sat down and tried to make sense out of it by reading about the history of political theory.
Labeling Woke cancel culture and the Bolshevik revolution as “right-wing politics” is a fine example of “reductio ad absurdum” that ideologies, such as yours, inevitability succumb to.
Thanks for the example and keep up the good work.
Andrew,
Here’s a headline from MSN “Shock poll: 28-percent of Democrats think America ‘better off’ if Trump assassinated”. Such results were typical with estimates of between 50-60% of the left comfortable, supportive, or strongly sympathetic to political assassination.
My point was you can safely take the “right-wing” out of the comment “Erasing out-groups is right-wing politics writ large”.
Anon:
I’m skeptical about that 28% number given that the source of that poll seems to be a strongly partisan organization. But, sure, even if the real number is only 14%, I think that’s too much! So, yeah, I agree with you on that. And, in any case, as noted in my comment above, lots of prominent Americans seem to have no problem with political assassination when it occurs in other countries.
I don’t see how that 28% number, even if I trusted it, is consistent with your other claim of “between 50-60% of the left comfortable, supportive, or strongly sympathetic to political assassination.” 28% is not between 50% and 60%.
Thanks for derailing yet another comment section with your off-topic, condescending, and thoroughly fact-free post.
yes Anon, you’re obviously right, that notorious master of cancel culture Joseph McCarthy was a crazy left winger for example /sarcasm
If we insist on left and right having no real meaning, we will make no sense of politics, and people will continue to be confused, and that confusion will benefit the hierarchical structures, and people can publish stuff like the book “the myth of left and right” (maybe, I’ve only read summary) as if left and right were just some labels like “rough and smooth” that people use to identify their in-group.
That wild-ass radical anarchist publication the *checks notes* Encyclopedia Britannica says
https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-spectrum
If instead, it retains its original and long time meaning as a spectrum of support for egalitarian to hierarchical decision making, then we can use it like a meter stick… Figure out how hierarchical the behavior is, and place that on a scale. McCarthy’s cancellations benefited a small in-group and damaged millions of average people on blacklists… thats hierarchical and to the right on the spectrum. That traditional out-groups have tried to coopt the strategy to put themselves higher in the hierarchy is sad, but it’s not necessarily surprising.
> If we insist on left and right having no real meaning, we will make no sense of politics, and people will continue to be confused
You will insist on left and right having no real meaning, unfortunately.
It’s become “garbage time,” gentlemen.
For clarification of what ideology probably means in this context, here is something from The Hill:
“The Trump administration gave California a 60-day deadline to overhaul its sex education program or risk losing federal funding.
California must eliminate “all gender ideology references” in its program and curriculum, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the Department of Health and Human Services said in a letter to the state. “
Removing ideology from research not sounding like a good idea and removing it being impossible are two very different matters. It’s entirely possible to both aim to reduce the influence of ideologies and to acknoweldge that in practice this can’t happen.
Put differently, we should be aiming to reduce “biasing ideology” in science and at the same time acknowledging, or separating between, what is ideology and what is evidence-based.
A slightly different point too: it’s not clear how minimising the role of ideology leads to the idea that every viewpoint needs to be equally represented. Some view points are more valid than others due to fundamental factors.
“That said, I’m generally supportive of the NIH policy to reduce, if not to work to fully remove, ideological influence from science. ”
Congratulations on being gullible. Everything MAGAworld doesn’t like will be labeled as “ideological”. Naturally, whatever confirms their biases will be considered objectively true.
Come:
Fair enough. Let me rephrase that to, “I’m generally supportive of the NIH’s stated policy to reduce, if not to work to fully remove, ideological influence from science.” [Italics added]
Andrew: When you say, “This sounds great.” are you being sarcastic? Or do you not know what the puppet’s master means by “ideological” in this context? Have you not seen what’s being cancelled under this directive? Maybe you just are missing how language works in a political context (i.e., the people in charge define the meanings of words)? Was it just comment bait? I’m really confused—I’d have thought you would understand what’s going on as a political science professor focused on the U.S.
Also, I’m very confused as to how you think one is supposed to interpret “remove ideological influence” that’s consistent with your comment, “I don’t think we could or should remove all ideological influence from science.”
I forgot the link in case you want to bone up on what’s been cancelled due to being too “ideological”:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/nih-funding-trump-lawsuit
Bob:
I agree with you. “This sounds great” makes no sense in that context. It must have been spliced from some other part of the post, or maybe it’s part of a sentence I was rewriting, or something like that, I don’t know. I’ve removed it.
I’ll focus on Alzheimer’s. The amyloid beta hypothesis was interesting in the 1990s, but by 2010 it was clearly a step backwards. Now we know every kind of malfunctioning cell accumulates amyloids, as that is the lowest energy state for peptides. Ie, without constant energy expended to clean them up, amyloids will accumulate in a tissue. Further, the previous cholinergic hypothesis actually yielded drugs that appeared effective, while the amyloid hypothesis never has, yet it became dogma anyway.
It is to the point where the FDA political appointees (Biden in this case) just override the science board to approve Alzheimer’s drugs because there is an “unmet need”: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005567149/3-experts-have-resigned-from-an-fda-committee-over-alzheimers-drug-approval
The devastating consequences are already here. Once again, this is all just people complaining about a change from their (counterproductive) ideology to a new different ideology. Neither is appropriate.
The science ideology is to use independent replication and quantitative (or at least surprising) predictions to judge the merit of research, and is orthogonal to both these ideologies.
You are right Andrew, there is no proof in science. Various explanations/hypotheses/models/theories/whatever must be compared to one another using Bayes rule. The key point is when a new idea come along, this changes the posterior probability of all the others. So the NIH plan is based on a false premise and thus unlikely to succeed (doomed?).
But ultimately the problem is NIH funds too large a proportion of medical research. The system is too centralized and thus not robust to bad ideas like NHST, etc. Indeed, this plan sounds like a continuation of using NHST to measure a wealth/influence-weighted collective opinion. Just the weights have been changed.
Agreed. Eliminating the beliefs of the researcher is clearly impossible and ignoring them (or fooling yourself that they do not exist) seems largely counterproductive. I wish there was a more robust and meaningful set of practices around researcher positionality statements. Those can certainly be shallow or performative, but I can imagine real engagement with that approach that could help make transparent a range of potential sources of bias. Naturally “this study was funded by X” is germane, but as Andrew points out so is “all authors of this study are morally opposed to the death penalty”.
This paper actually comes to mind: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15291006231163179. The preface explains in concrete terms the pre-existing life experiences and research trajectories that led the authors to have distinct opinions on the nature and consequences of gender bias in science. And by being transparent about that we can judge however we like what affect that may have had on the results of the paper.
Granted, it would be very hard to draw the line between a researcher’s “belief” in the reality of some theory and their being guided by a body of evidence. Since we all recognize that scientists are subject to believing in their pet theories, at times far beyond the quality of evidence.
“… maybe the executives at HHS are too busy with politics to worry about what’s happening inside the NIH?” This seems unlikely: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-will-eliminate-many-peer-review-panels-and-lay-some-scientists-overseeing-them.
In practice, “ideology” means “assumptions and beliefs I disagree with”. Who thinks their own mental framework is a form of ideology? When someone says that ideology should be removed from research, an academic department or whatever, it typically means they don’t like the content of what’s being taught or produced. That goes double for someone in charge of a govt agency under Trump.
In the happy world of pure philosophy of science, the OP would be right in saying that ideological motivation is OK as long is it doesn’t obstruct the process of scrutinizing data for the evidence it actually provides. Maybe an extra step: go out of your way to look for evidence that contradicts what you thought going in. Feynman….
I think careerism and opportunism are the big dangers. Lysenko got the politicians on his side, and all followed. If I were researching autism in the US today, I might cynically find links to vaccines. Profit motivates more than abstract ideas.
Anonymous said “Here’s a headline from MSN “Shock poll: 28-percent of Democrats think America ‘better off’ if Trump assassinated”.” and “Such results were typical with estimates of between 50-60% of the left comfortable, supportive, or strongly sympathetic to political assassination.”
That kind of thinking reminds me of the studies, frequently critiqued on this blog, that claim to draw conclusions about some outcome that they never even measured.
I am an absolute pacifist, and I just barely, and reluctantly, accept that self-defense is legitimate grounds for killing. I am horrified by killing, anywhere and anytime. But, frankly, the way things are heading in the US these days, I absolutely believe that we would be better off if we were rid of Trump. If someone were to assassinate him, yes, the United States would be better off. That in no way implies that I’m comfortable with assassinations. And it in no way implies that I think that that consequence would justify assassinating him. I would easily sit on a jury and convict a person who had been shown to assassinate Trump. As a judge, I’d lock the assassin up and throw away the key.
While I won’t claim that my revulsion at homicide is universally shared, or even widely shared on the left, nor on the right, I cite my own stance because of its stark clarity. There is simply no implication that those who think the United States would be better off if Trump were assassinated are comfortable with, or even tolerant of, assassination. Evil deeds sometimes have good consequences, and I think most people understand that.
And just by way of background, the spectrum of my own political views, when labeled according to conventional wisdom, ranges all the way from far left to far right.
I’d like to pass along a statement on this which Brian Nosek recently shared with some folks – it’s a statement from the Center for Open Science on the EO: https://www.cos.io/about/news/cos-statement-on-restoring-gold-standard-science-executive-order
Your (last) paragraph is much more succinct and effective than the COS statement in my opinion.
That was a mistake. It was all a quote and I corrected the formatting. Unless you have editorial privileges, you can’t edit posts!
This is already how it was, I have been complaining about it for a decade (since I first interacted with academia and NIH).
Now the ideology changed, and people don’t like the new one so they’re complaining. Instead, lets actually fix things and use independent replication and relative predictive skill. But, as usual, once gov is involved no one is on the side of actually solving problems.
Eg, I was just thinking about cancer. What if there was cancer so common that millions of people get a case each year? It is also not at all dangerous to observe for some time, is observable with no special equipment, and further these millions are already being biopsied and available for study.
According to my ideology (Science), this cancer would be studied in as depth as possible. Practically the entire cancer budget would go to figuring out that cheap and easily available cancer to the point it was quantitative.
This exists, its call basal cell carcinoma, and the prevailing ideology has these millions of records literally being thrown in the trash. I had one removed and got told I was the first one to ever ask to get a pic of the biopsy slide. Next one I’m going to try to get sequenced too. It is up to “the public” to figure it out for themselves, the funding agencies refuse to do it.
Point is the existing ideology, whatever it you call it, is obviously not science. It is something counterproductive in the Gresham’s law sense, sucking up all the funding and filling journals with 50-80% misinfo claims. This happens until there is no room for projects that would actually cumulatively improve our knowledge of cancer.
Anonenuoid:
Why are you continuing to waste everyone’s time with your incompetence? This is amongst the the least scientific and most ideology-driven things I have ever read. It is shocking that you lack the ability to see it. You getting scared about the result of an autopsy, looking up some frequencies to see that what you have is common, and using that as an excuse to come to the conclusion that “Practically the entire cancer budget” should cater to the thing affecting you is baffling in its leap of logic. There are plenty of other things to affect what money (and time) goes to, such as the number of deaths a cancer causes, and the quality of life that it or its treatment produces. I can’t believe I have to spell that out. You write that you have been complaining about things for decades. Good. I hope no one ever wastes their time listening to your self-proclaimed scientific but truly self-serving ramblings. I will not respond.
The point it is easy to study. Model the entire skin cell division process in normal and carcinoma tissue. Actually understanding the dynamics of how it works. What are the turnover rates of the normal basal cells, how many divisions from the zygote before they turn cancerous. And so on.
Instead we get unproductive “significant correlations” with this or that which never lead anywhere besides “cancer is more complicated than we thought”. As seen from your post, there is not even recognition of how to apply science to the problem.
You solve the simpler problem first. Science makes the phenomenon seem simpler. If it seems more and more complex after decades of research that is a *bad* sign of ad hockery, not a good sign of progress.
Anoneuoid:
I think the reason that there is relatively little funding for research on basal cell carcinoma is that it has an extremely low case fatality rate. Surgical excision with a margin is typically curative, and even recurrences, when they occur, are usually not hard to treat. So focusing on this might be analogous to the old joke about looking for your keys at night where the light is best even though you dropped them somewhere else.
It may be true that with more research on basal cell carcinoma, which, as you note correctly, is easier to study than internal cancers, one might learn some general principles about cell biology that might be applicable to the prevention or treatment of other, more lethal, cancers. But that is speculative. And, at least so far, the most effective treatments we have discovered for cancers tend to be specific to tumors with particular molecular characteristics of their DNA or protein expression.
A good research program needs to invest both in research focused on the most pressing current problems and in research of a more knowledge-seeking nature that develops insights that might support applications in the future. Reasonable people can disagree about what proportions of each would be best. Suffice it to say that public policy which is somewhat accountable to public opinion will be more inclined to do research that is perceived as targeted to pressing current problems.
Yep, which is inverted from how a scientific ideology operates. As noted, even the tissue samples *already exist* waiting to teach us, but get thrown in the trash. Its just crazy.
Mitzi:
Thanks for sharing Nosek’s statement, which I agree with and which I think is expressed well. On one hand, all this gold standard science rhetoric. On the other hand, a HHS secretary who said, “COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” I don’t think that statement was based on “testable hypotheses” or “rigorous research.” The whole thing seems very Stalinist–or, as the saying goes, “Orwellian.”
Brian “Do as I say, Don’t do as I do” Nosek might be one of the people (in-)directly responsible for the criticism concerning ideology given his work on implicit bias stuff and all the possible consequences regarding that stuff if I am thinking about this all some more. I don’t want to think about that.
Regardless, I wonder what he thinks about his (promotion of) large scale “collaborative” efforts and the role of “market places” of ideas and all that good stuff. I mean, does he think that those kinds of “collaborative” projects might (in some ways) make it nearly impossible for a “market place of ideas” to even exist given the possibility that these large scale “collaborative” efforts kind of shout so loud that nothing else is heard.
Mr. Nosek, his work, and above all his behavior, is one of the main reasons I left “open science” and psychological science itself, and this is all reinforced again and again after reading about his retracted paper and now this stuff from him and/or his organization. It’s all so incredibly sad (and other things) to me, which is perhaps why it’s a good thing I left.
Quote from above: “(…) and this is all reinforced again and again after reading about his retracted paper and now this stuff from him and/or his organization.”
Just two examples from the quoted post by the COS above in the comment section here:
1) From Mr. Nosek’s and or COS’s post depicted above (if that’s indeed a quote by him/the organization):
“Good research is conducted as rigorously as possible given available resources.”
That statement doesn’t make much sense to me and/or is phrased sub-optimally. “Good research” is not necessarily achieved when doing things “as rigorously as possible given available resources” me thinks, regardless of what “rigorously” exactly implies. This formulation of the connection between good, and as rigorously as possible, research is problematic and/or unclear to me.
2) From Mr. Nosek’s and or COS’s post depicted above (if that’s indeed a quote by him/the organization):
“Responsible policymaking uses the best available evidence.”
I hope responsible policymaking also uses other things, and thoughts, and views, etc. Regardless of those things, what is “best” in this case? Isn’t that dependent on some criteria? And isn’t that part of the whole issue here? Aren’t such possible criteria referred to in the statement by Mr. Nosek and/or the COS when they write “The Executive Order suggests that research must achieve these criteria to be considered research done with integrity and to be useful for policymaking”? If so, what even is the point of this sentence by Nosek and/or the COS in light of the discussion?
I have come to notice more and more over the years that lot’s of things Mr. Nosek writes and/or does wonder me. Maybe I should do a top 5 or something like that…
My top 5 of things Mr. Nosek has (not) done and/or written that wonder me still to this day. Please check for accuracy yourself, I am thinking, remembering, and searching for stuff partly that happened years ago:
1) I wonder whether Mr. Nosek does not only promote replicating, and/or himself replicated, experiments or studies, but also ideas and procedures.
If I am not mistaken, the open practices badges by the COS replicate or resemble a reproducibility policy of the journal Biostatistics (see Peng, 2009; Rowhani-Farid & Barnett, 2018); the Registered Reports replicate or resemble earlier procedures by the journal The Lancet (see Hardwicke & Ioannidis, 2018); and his co-authored retracted paper seemed to replicate and or resemble a format of replication that has been mentioned on a forum he replied to years before.
2) I wonder what Mr. Nosek thinks words like “transparency” and “openness” and “pre-registration” mean or imply.
If I am not mistaken, he and/or the COS promoted Registered Reports which seemed to in some cases be unable to openly provide what seems to me to be the most important part: the pre-registration (see Harwicke & Ioannidis, 2018). One might think this is strange as he seemed to talk about “transparency” and “pre-registration” a lot in those days. Anyway, apparently this whole “pre-registration” thing is hard for him for some reason as it seems that “pre-registration” issues were part of the reason for retracting a recent co-authored paper (see Bak-Coleman & Denever, 2024).
3) I wonder whether Mr. Nosek thinks being careful in one’s wording and reasoning and conclusions and recommendations might be important in science.
I still can’t get over the series of titles of his co-authored papers which include the word “utopia” if I remember correctly. I thought at the time that one might at least put a question mark behind those kinds of words. But perhaps it can even better be argued that these types of words are probably not optimal in scientific writing. Additionally, his co-authored paper concerning the open practices badges (see Kidwell et al., 2016) has been discussed by Bastian in a blog titled “Bias in Open Science advocacy: The case of article badges for data sharing” which mentions similar possible sub-optimal concluding and phrasing and hyping of certain things if I am remembering correctly.
4) I wonder whether Mr. Nosek thinks teaching, and honing, logic and reasoning and argumentation might be useful in psychological science and something to mention and promote.
Ever since I read one of Mr. Nosek’s papers that includes the word “utopia” in the title, I wondered about some of the sentences in it. I never understood what seemed to me to be the reasoning that many of the problematic issues had to do with “the incentives” and the “publish or perish” stuff, as I reason that tenured staff should have the academic freedom to act in accordance with scientific values and principles and responsibilities and not worry about such things. Also: why would a university care how much papers their staff publish, and/or what might be the real crucial issue here? Anyway, I wonder whether Mr. Nosek has written about the importance of logic and reasoning and argumentation, or whether Mr. Nosek thinks these kinds of things deserve much more attention than they have had thus far in all of these discussions.
5) I wonder whether Mr. Nosek thinks there should (also) be some more attention for individual scientists’ personalities and choices and responsibilities in light of all the problematic issues in psychological science and academia.
Just as seems to be the case concerning logic and reasoning and argumentation, I seem to hardly read anything about individual scientists’ personalities and responsibilities in light of all the problematic issues in psychological science and academia from Mr. Nosek. Does Mr. Nosek think this topic (also) deserves more attention, just as I do? Does Mr. Nosek think there might be scientists with illusions of grandeur who might do a lot of harm whilst saying they want to do good? Or does Mr. Nosek think there might be power-hungry psychological scientists who want the direct things and tell others what to do? Does Mr. Nosek think these things deserve some more attention in light of all the problematic issues, also so others can maybe become more aware of certain things? Would it be okay in this light to refer to my own writing titled “Why psychopathy might be present and prosperous in present-day psychological science” which can be found on SSRN to try and get some more attention concerning this all?
Alexander:
I think Nosek has done some great work and has made important contributions to the scientific community. I also think he has been pulled in various directions (see this discussion, for example), and I think it’s good that his work is itself subject to criticism. I value Nosek for the contributions he’s made. I don’t think he’s perfect, and I don’t think he (or anyone else) should be science dictator. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to think that either.
I am astonished that you take that statement as if it were made in good faith.
Cartoonist:
I don’t take the statement as if it were made in good faith. But I can still interpret it as stated.
I think the call to remove ideology from scientific inquiry is based on the fact that ideology can distort and suppress scientific inquiry, leading to disastrous consequences. The case in point is Trofim Lysenko who championed flawed agricultural practices that led to widespread famine in the Soviet Union. The reason his wrong ideas gained traction is because Stalin thought they aligned with Marxist ideology.
Larry:
Agreed. That’s why I said I’m generally supportive of the stated NIH policy to reduce, if not to work to fully remove, ideological influence from science.
Also, my impression of the Lysenko story is that his bad ideas gained traction partly from the ideology and partly from Lysenko’s unscrupulousness and his success at bureaucratic infighting.
No, this current call (the one we’re actually talking about) is an attempt to replace honest science that, despite some yucky glitches (string theory, power pose), is crunching along figuring out things about actual reality, with an actual idealogy (or complex of ideologies, or maybe just a hodgepodge of things; but stuff like it was a lab leak and vaccines cause autistm are the new game in town for US science), and the first step is to cut funding for anything that might find an actual truth that the current administration doesn’t/wouldn’t like.
We’re going towards Lysenko sorts of things, not away from them. And it’s going to be disaster for, e.g., the parts of medical science that are really making progress.
David:
I would distinguish between NIH’s stated science policy which, if interpreted with some allowance for its sloppy phrasing and perhaps sloppy thinking, seems generally reasonable to me and a move against Lysenko-style research, and the government’s actually-implemented science policy, which seems to be very much in the Lysenko spirit of evaluating science based on a combination of political ideology and political influence.
Two things make me skeptical of the NIH’s stated policy. First, the head of the parent organization of NIH is actively pushing junk science, discredited science fraud, and fake science, along with unsupported conspiracy theories. Second, the director of NIH misrepresented something I wrote in a public forum, which makes me concerned about his standards for evaluating evidence.
My reply was a reply to Larry, not you (Andrew). You write faster (and better) than I do.
Whatever, the reality is that the _intent_ of the current administration is to trash science as we know and understand it. It’s stated goal of “removing ideology” is going to be used to justify cancelling research that Republicans don’t like. And that’s a lot of current research*. Welcome to 1984.
*: As Paul Krugman pointed out years ago, “reality has a liberal bias”, which means that a Republican administration is going to be bad for science.
Jay’s father attended my alma mater, Bengal Engineering College, notable as the first degree-granting engineering college in Asia. Among us, there was a lighthearted jest that students pursuing medicine, such as Jay, did so due to challenges with mathematics. This brings to mind the anecdote of Einstein’s disapproval of his son’s choice of a “lower” scientific field at Berkeley and guess what? Engineering! Anyway, Jay’s mathematical comprehension appears dubious, a deficiency I’ve frequently encountered among epidemiology/medical professionals regarding their understanding, or lack thereof, of statistics, especially math stats …
Maybe it’s important and/or useful in some way, shape, or form to try and make things even more clear by providing some more examples of what I wonder about, and why I left psychological science. So, in that light I hope it’s okay to share some more wonderments concerning Mr. Nosek’s and the COS’ writing and actions. If I am not mistaken he co-authored another “utopia” paper about “crowdsourcing science”, so I reason he can’t really be against me, as some member of the general public, commenting on things. Or perhaps he has some other view of what “crowdsourcing” implies and means, perhaps it’s more like “crowding out” and “outsourcing” for him. Anyway, the top 5 depicted somewhere in the comment section here is hereby been made into a top 10! Here are numbers 6–10 of things I wonder about concerning Mr. Nosek and the COS:
6) The COS statement depicted above reads “Progress is made in research by acquiring evidence, critiquing that evidence, and pursuing additional evidence to address the weaknesses and alternative explanations”. Does Mr. Nosek have a solution for the situation in which the critiqued scientist does not really engage in this all in a scientifically appropriate manner?
Should he need some specific examples of this possible scenario, perhaps the blogpost by Bastian about the open practices badges mentioned earlier might be useful here. The blogpost notes that “PubMed Commons link updated with archived version at Hypothesis. The authors, although notified of this comment, never replied.”
If I remember correctly, Mr. Nosek did reply in the comment section of the blogpost at the time, but the comments seem to not be available anymore. If my memory is correct, his reply at the time seemed to me to be rather casual and not really addressing matters.
Another example of this possible scenario can be found perhaps in a blogpost from Bak-Coleman concerning the retracted co-authored paper by Mr. Nosek. In that blogpost the following can be read: “So far, there has been no engagement with any of the evidence and only continued statements that conflict with it.”
7) From the COS statement “(…) Transparency and protection from inappropriate influence are hallmarks of scientific integrity.” Does and/or has Mr. Nosek and/or the COS accept(-ed) funding from anonymous sources and/or certain organizations or people which may have certain goals and demands? And if so, how does this in their view relate to the quoted statement, more specifically the possible dangers of “inappropriate influence”? And in the case of possibly accepting funding from anonymous sources, how does this in their view relate to their continued mentioning of the importance of transparency and openness?
8) From the COS statement “There is no central authority to determine truth, and historical examples highlight the dangers of empowering the state to determine scientific truths. “
How does Mr. Nosek think (the gist of) this reasoning relates to his promotion of TOP-guidelines which seem to work towards a “level 3 verification” of certain things? Might such a “level 3 verification” imply or result in some third party determining whether things like pre-registration are done “correctly”? And might this even result in not making the pre-registration available to the actual reader of the paper because it might be reasoned that this is not necessary because some “third party” has verified things? And is there some sort of conflict of interest here, in which Mr. Nosek or the COS might (financially) benefit from this “verification” or even propose to do this all themselves?
9) Given the above example of the TOP guidelines, is Mr. Nosek aware of all the examples of proposals for improvement that have been done in the past and may have had damaging or even disastrous results (e.g. see Edwards & Roy, 2017)? If so, how does this relate to his TOP-guidelines and open practices badges proposals? Does he think about how these things might be abused (in the future), or have negative effects just like peer-review, journal impact factors, etc.?
10) Talking about possible negative effects of things, does Mr. Nosek worry he and/or his organization is having way too much influence and power. Does he think it might be inappropriate for example for his organization to include other people’s pre-registration formats on their website because that might be seen as a way to centralize things unnecessarily? Does he think proposing some centralized data-collection procedure for some “collaborative” project is a form of centralization and might possibly be very dangerous? Does he think that connecting a preprint server with submitting a paper to a journal might pave the way for ever more centralization and conflicts of interest and manipulation? Does he think “collaboration” might in some cases actually be or involve “centralization”?
Anyway, just some more thoughts, and explanations…