As a teacher, I feel more or less the exact same way about education. Do I want Trump and Musk to come in to the education sphere with their sledgehammer approach? No. Do I think the Republican views on education are all correct? No. But do we have deep, fundamental problems in our education system that should cause significant reflection and change? Oh yes.
This is so true! Do you think reform is possible without tearing it down (at least pretty much) first? I've been asking myself this question a lot in recent weeks. I want to think it is, but my gut feeling is that maybe it's not...
I don’t know. There’s such a mindset shift required- we new to embrace a lower-case conservative approach. Teach in a manner that we know works. Don’t advance kids to the next grade if they can’t prove they can handle the current work. Track/stream kids to some degree based on an ability. Acknowledge that students will sometimes fail, sometimes not graduate. Raise the bar and help most students get over it, stop lowering the bar and dragging all kids over it.
I have a hard time seeing a progressive bureaucracy doing any of this
There's nothing more revealing then the chart that shows DoE spending vs. achievement. Yes, I'm aware some of the extra spending has helped some people, particularly the disabled, to have somewhat better educational outcomes. But even there...how have those improved education outcomes translated to better lives than pre-DoE?
Yes, please sledgehammer it. Day and night. Until it is rubble.
The education establishment is out of time. Any parent who can get their kids out of public schools is doing so.
I’ll personally go without to make sure my grandchildren never step foot in a bureaucratic school. Fortunately my daughter and son in law made provisions before they had kids that allow them a great deal of flexibility in education.
I think this brief essay may interest you......look especially at how school district are cutting the scores needed to be called "proficient".........Haven't such things been going on for a while?
Thanks for this, it is indeed interesting. I can also add from my own personal experience that last year the College Board gave in and significantly raised the passing rates on many AP exams
It is frustrating that the response to cratering public trust is to cry "disinformation!", or insist that Trump is worse, or whine about how the modern education system churns out scientific illiterates, and never "maybe we need to ensure we behave in a trustworthy manner". The issues that plague science are well-founded and well-publicized. It certainly puts one in a conspiratorial mindset when these issues are raised again and again and again and again, and the only response is a closing of ranks and mealy-mouthed mumbling. Police, on the whole, *welcomed* body cams. Why do scientists appear so reluctant to embrace the equivalent?
Thank you for the book rec. I've found this entire area morbidly fascinating. Science is difficult, especially the sorts of questions we're putting to it nowadays. But we've made it so much more difficult by allowing mass corruption of the entire process to set in. Many of the fixes would be relatively simple! But they're not being implemented.
This kind of broad-based reappraisal is challenging in the face of so many bad-faith populist attacks. For the same reason, Jesse is bummed out by the coincidence of Trump and the release of this Alzheimer's book
Halfway through this book now. We have basically lost my mother in law to advanced dementia. She was the sweetest woman in the world and now there's nothing left of her. This whole story makes me really, really angry.
FWIW, this piece is why I love you. The only appropriate response to this stuff is to cling tightly to the truth, to what can be proven or disproven, and to focus down on root causes. All strength flows from those actions and any attempts to elide the necessity of “doing the work” can only end in collapse.
We need some sort of adversarial incentive system in science. People need to feel real rewards for finding errors and for calling bullshit in their own life’s work. Anything less than that, as I’ve thought about this, is going to leave the problem unaddressed.
This adversarial approach is what I was raised to believe science *was*. I remain dumbfounded how "do the work" has become a retort against rigor, and "critical thinking" is a field that handwaves logic and causality.
The ELI5 of science is “I did a thing and another guy who I don’t know follows the exact same steps I followed and also observed the same thing happened, or if he doesn’t he argues with me about my steps.”
It’s not always that simple, and people like Adam Mastroaonni (sp?) do really good work in exploring differences in how science has worked historically.
I point this out not to be a pedant, but because turning science into a “cookbook” has been part of the problem.
It is so hard to get funding for replication studies. And then good luck getting it published. It’s so frustrating.
Years ago, the Gates Foundation funded genomics curation grants where the purpose was to go through the published genome of whatever organism and look for errors like misassembly, contamination from the human genome, sequencing vectors etc and sequencing errors. This was a big deal because it was hrs to ge that kind of funding from other sources. And these kind of things could be a big deal so it needs to be funded.
Academic journal publishing is such a con that I'm surprised Trump hasn't started his own publishing house.
Researchers get the money through grants and do the research. They then try to get it published in a good journal. The journal sends the article to other researchers for peer review. They do this for free (or in reality pass it off to a grad student) and then recommend (or not) for the article to be published. Article may even be published if the review says that it's crap and shouldn't be published. Article is published and libraries pay the journal a fuck-ton of money so that other researchers and students can access the article. Or authors can pay the journal so that researchers can access their article.
Now that nearly all journals are online, and many are online only, they don't have the overhead of paying for printing physical copies and all of the overhead that goes with that.
Oh and if the library decides to cancel their subscription as the yearly price hike has gotten to be too much, they loose online access to all of the previous years of the journal even though they had paid for them.
As you note, scientific institutions are not always acting in support of science. People are being told to trust experts based on their credentials rather than on the accuracy of what they say, and research journals, their colleagues, news media and the public are doing so. The journals and colleagues should have stopped this at the outset.
Here's from one of those Yale essays (Boulware et al, 2022): "In this report, we cite studies that are peer-reviewed, up to date, conducted by respected investigators, and published in high-impact journals that are widely read. This represents the highest-quality evidence available to physicians making treatment decisions in this context."
No...the way you figure out quality of a study is by **looking at the study** and evaluating it rigorously for bias and various shortcomings. Evidence based medicine has been the way since the 90's. You don't look at how famous the author is and how important the journal is, although those should be correlated.
In gender medicine, many journals are deferring to the people at high prestige institutions and the latter are unreliable (as one might say, not doing science, witness the Chen et al paper or the McNamara et al Yale critique of Cass ).
The authors have the name, prestige, but not the science--McNamara (Yale), Turban (UCSF), Olson-Kennedy (USC)--their critique of the Cass Review that was so error laden that none of these rebuttals had room to cover all of the problems. The science is doing just fine, thank you.
It's a closed loop. We are right not to trust these institutions if they are not doing their job, and they aren't. The problem isn't with science, it's with the people pretending to do it and all those who are colluding in covering up what they actually are doing. In gender medicine this currently includes most of the journals, and most of the "major medical associations," all of whom could fix this by sticking to their claimed missions. For instance, how about recommendations based upon systematic reviews of the evidence instead of suppressing the review outcomes when they didn't like them (as you reported in the Economist, and the BMJ followed up?):
The distinction is getting lost in the havoc, but those doubling down to back up researchers, journals and institutions who aren't following the rules of science but claiming its mantle of authority are making it worse.
Oooh "People are being told to trust experts based on their credentials rather than on the accuracy of what they say" That's perfect.
In a limited way, what I do touches on critical appraisal and I always make sure to point out that just because something has been cited a lot does NOT mean it's good research. Maybe a lot of other pubs are pointing out the flaws in it. I think critical appraisal and critical thinking are something that should be taught from kindergarten onwards.
For anyone interested in critical appraisal when it comes to research - particularly biomedical research, check out CASP - https://casp-uk.net/casp-tools-checklists/. Very, very helpful.
Also, in my experience a lot of people who should know what a systematic review is, don't. Or don't really understand the process that a good systematic review should go through.
I honestly don't know why anyone's surprised by this.
Most Americans aren't aware of the high-level controversies among scientists, or swayed by research scandals, or outraged by the replicability crisis. For average folks, their most common encounter with a scientist in a white coat is a doctor. And they are PISSED at that person, and that white coat.
Doctors fail most of us now, daily and catastrophically. If you are overweight (and that's two-thirds of us), they will outright deny you care until you "go lose some weight" -- a feat that, statistically, literally one in a hundred people will ever pull off permanently without surgery or GLP-1s (the only treatments that actually work). If you are female, doctors will categorically write off most of your complaints as meaningless. (The average woman with endometriosis needs 14 office visits before she gets diagnosed. ) Woe betide you if you are both overweight and female; odds are good that you'll leave the office with your issues unaddressed, and probably feeling like total crap about yourself as well. If you're also black and pregnant...well, we all know how that one ends.
For those who, by dint of gender, race, or mass, are deemed to merit better attention, there's still the lurking knowledge that the doctor is rationing your care based on what your insurance company is likely to pay for. Americans seldom get the best treatment. They get what the system will allow them to have, which is less every year. Knowing that our health is no longer the system's main priority doesn't add much to medicine's overall credibility. We all know there's another agenda at work now. We have learned that money trumps science every time.
And then the medical establishment is astonished when women who've been abused by this system (which is most of us; don't get us together in a room and talking, unless you've brought wine) decide not to take the doctor's advice about, say, vaccinating their kids, or wearing masks, or keeping them out of school. Why on earth should they believe someone who's being paid by insurance companies to deny us care, not listen to us, and refuse to tend to our issues? We know our well-being is not your first priority, Doc. We know someone, somewhere, is paying you to say that.
American medicine is great at problems that befall soldiers, athletes, and businessmen -- nobody tops us in acute care, orthopedics, or cardiology, and no doctors get paid more -- but horrible at tending to the common problems of women and the working class. Because of this, the rage non-white non-men feel about the abuses of US medical care is deep, personal, and pervasive.
And then you wonder why all these mistreated people don't think science is on their side. In their limited experience with "scientific" people, it hasn't been for a long, long time. So when other people in white coats stand up and try to tell them what's good for them, their first impulse is to tell them to fuck straight off. Because whoever it is you work for, Doctor, it sure as shit ain't me.
I feel like a lot of the veneration of science sprang from the New Atheism movement in the aughts. All of a sudden science, and the materialist view in general, became a central worship of many atheists - and I'll admit, myself included. I simply replaced religion with science.
Of course any discipline that becomes venerated will have rot start to take hold. People are too fallible and there is often a lot of money and prestige at stake.
I highly recommend "The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan (might have been the last book he published; it reads like a coda or sorts), c. 1997, so just before Dawkins, et al really burst on the scene. It is not doctrinaire, and it is both humble and in awe of what we have been able to do as people putting together this tool called "science".
And here I thought the veneration of science had its roots in the work of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Watson and Crick and other foundational figures.
Where has the impulse to *disprove* things gone? Isn't that central to "science?" Where are the rabid, dogged skeptics, and what reward is there for them?
It was my first spark of "love" for Jesse--his desire to disprove things earned my trust and devotion. Keep plugging away Jesse.
I'm not interested in digging them all up now, but there were like 4 replications, all in pretty non-prestigious journals, and no one could replicate it.
The establishment ignored the failed replications, taught the original paper as truth, and the original first author researcher is tenured and well paid at a fancy institution. The second author was already revered because he wrote a lot of popular science books about how primates aren't mean, they are nice and altruistic, and therefore people are inherently altruistic; this jived with some or other moral trend in science at this time, so he would be beyond question.
I'm sure everyone who did a replication is not a professional scientist now.
I think that's my point. "What reward is there for them?" The answer is apparently "None." There should be. We should herald the heros who disprove every scientific claim out there. Instead of being sold drugs that sorta-work we should be sold solid science that tells us how they don't fully work. We all should hunger for what we're NOT being told, or emphasize the gaps in the findings/research.
Those are the heroes. And they'll make TRUE heroes out of scientists that do good, unassailable, solid research with conservative, honest, replicable findings.
Until then it's all just words on a page and employment security for the weakest.
People trying to disprove false claims are often being muzzled. Science is fine. The scientific process is fine. But...it is not what is happening here.
Unfortunately, the government also bears some responsibility for the mess as a result of doing things like distributing grants based on the applicant's stated commitment to advancing DEI. Small wonder that people became less trusting of science when those responsible for choosing which studies would be funded did so based on partisan ideology. Some universities have used similar criteria when choosing who to hire, thus influencing what studies are proposed in the first place.
I just spoke with someone who does grants for a non-science area (so not apples to apples) who had to go through all their proposals and strip various terms. Some terms such as “disadvantaged” made the cut and remain, but the general mood was that this is just a song and dance to get to the same place (the grant money). We shall see, I guess.
It would be nice if we could have institutions that both accepted race as a concept with real world impact but not demand that every area of inquiry demonstrate how race applies to it.
Agreed. The issue (in my eyes, anyway) was never that race was being discussed, but that adherence to certain contested views on how to deal with inequality was demanded, even in areas completely unrelated to it.
When you speak of the actions of Musk and Trump you are agitated about the immediate impact, the "hatchet" and the broken flask headline image. More than just current science projects, they are changing the process. They are adding transparency by doing very public audits. It will be very difficult to go back to doing the business of science behind a curtain. There is creative destruction going on. If it leads to a permanent better process for government involvement in science, it will be many times worth the cost.
"They are adding transparency by doing very public audits."
This just isn't true, unfortunately. They (by which I mean mostly Musk) are posting out-of-context snippets online, often misunderstood. If the Trump administration wanted to do real, independent audits of our science funding, they would have had vast power to do so. That isn't the path they chose. We know this because of how swift it has been -- actual audits take time.
DOGE itself is immune from FOIA requests for ten years, as its legal status in the government has been carefully chosen to make it immune to congressional oversight and FOIA requests. The group will dissolve in two years, a deadline which allows it to shut down just before a potential future Democratic congress is inaugurated which might eliminate these protections. Very transparent!
Out of context snippets is correct. That is not the end result. They are in the middle of an audit of which the result will be public. We are talking about something that started literally days ago and you are expecting the final product to be produced yesterday. Give it some time. And yes there is misunderstanding as much of this was not previously accessible. As more people have more time to digest it, inconsistencies will be ironed out. More information better, yes? This isn't a one shot deal. The end result will support audits each subsequent year, not just this year.
Please, tell me where I find the very public audits that formed the basis for Musk's obliteration of the U.S.A.I.D. Also, point me to the windows where I can view the Musk team's transparent audit process in real time or at all.
I don't know how the process works (I'm not a US citizen), but I'm under the impression all this much talked about "transparency" and "auditing" has always been on the public record, no?
Like, all the horrible USAID spending was published transparently on their website (till Musk took it down) for everyone to see.
Now there's a slew of self-proclaimed "auditors" tweeting such and such line of spending, as if they were discovering an incredible secret, which was out in the open, all along!
The Department of Defense has been unable to pass a yearly audit for seven years -- 7 years. Clearly they are not even trying. Payments missing details of who and why make it impossible to reconcile payments with intentions. Did NIH fund gain of function research? We have spent years trying to decide that. Even harder in USAID where large amounts of money are paid to NGOs with zero accountability of where the money goes or whether the desired goal is actually achieved. Some of this was visible but without a complete audit it is difficult to contextualize it and thus up to this point little was accomplished. People were getting used to shrugging their shoulders and concluding the government is too big to understand. We have reached a tipping point where people see that an audit can be done, it can be understood. As a result we have an enormous focus on how the government is spending money. Now that the information is more fully transparent, any one can see and comment. Sort of like a democracy.
One of the biggest contractors of the Department of Defense is... Elon Musk!
That one will surely never, ever, be audited or rendered public so we can see all of his shenanigans.
This isn't about "transparency" and accountability: it's a power move from an unelected Broligarch breaking numerous laws in order to beat down all the public servants, force consent, uproot real democrats and load the government with sycophants.
I'll believe you and retract everything I said, once Musk publishes his contracts with the Department of Defense.
Until that happens, the US sorta has an oligarchy, not a democracy.
For last 5 years Lockheed Martin is the largest defense contractor at $234 billion. For the same time span SpaceX defense contracts are $2.85 billion, not one of the biggest.
Here is the list of contracts I was able to find:
Classified Contract (2021): $1.8 billion
Starshield Contract with U.S. Space Force (2023): Up to $70 million
NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 (2024): $733.5 million
Rocket Cargo Program (2022): $102 million
Missile-Warning Satellites (2020): $149 million
Large defense contracts to well known companies are hard to hide.
This looks more like the moves of a Russian oligarch doing Putin's bidding, than a bona fide democrat trying to "audit corruption" or whatever. I think it's really naïve to trust this guy or think he has your (our) best interests in mind.
I find myself constantly pointing out that Letting problems like this fester empowers the cranks. If a crank pints out a real problem that institutions ignore, brush aside or deny, that means there was one time that the crank was right. A crank who was right at least one time will have a much easier time convincing people that their crank ideas are correct.
We saw this with the mishandling of the mRNA-induced myocarditis. Our health officials didn’t talk much about it and the. Insisted that the benefits outweighed the risks (for most people but not say for a 20 year old male who’s already had Covid) so the cranks had a chance to be right when the institutions were fumbling
This one is what really disillusioned me. I got covid pre-vaccine in October of 2020 and got over it without any drugs stronger than ibuprofin. I got the vaccine in April 2021 when I was a 27 year old, healthy man. I never had any complications from it far as I can tell, but I think with the knowledge we have today I would have declined the vaccine. I also never got any boosters. The covid vaccine was a medical marvel that saved a lot of lives, and also a tool that was not one-size-fits-all solution. As a result I trust public health experts a lot less, and that is a damn shame.
I think public health and many highly educated liberals lost the plot when they emphasized the collective benefit and downplayed the individual benefit. For infectious agents like Measles, the collective benefit is bigger now because nearly everyone has immunity. Once you have a lower level of immunity, the individual benefit will become more prominent. But, the individual benefit from the measles vaccine is huge, so it is pretty easy to sell the vaccine on an individual benefit level.
With Covid and other respiratory viruses, with naturla immunity you get reinfected ever 1-3 years so there was no reason to expect that they would have a major effect on Covid transmission for very long. Vaccines against respiratory viruses like flu and Covid primarily benefit the person who gets the vaccine. And that’s great, but insisting that people who are either not going to benefit or have a very small benefit need to get a vaccine because it should cut down on transmission by some amount is not a reasonable argument.
What is interesting is that since Covid I’ve noticed that more and more highly educated non-scientists see vaccines primarily a collective interventions. I’ve been repeatedly assured that flu vaccines don’t work unless enough people get them. Which isn’t true. If you get the vaccine it will protect you to some degree against disease but you don’t get much in the way of sterilizing immunity from the vaccine.
When health officials and media repeat this claim it erodes their credibility further. And we’re in even more trouble if cranks or crank-adjacent types start pointing that out
That was actually my rationale at the time for getting the vaccine - I got it because I thought it would cut down on transmission, and it was to benefit the people around me. I knew at the time that it probably wouldn't help me beat the virus any better since I had been previously infected. Once it came out it didn't really help with transmission, well, yeah. I was incredibly pissed, especially since it turned out I was part of the group at highest risk for myocarditis.
I want a solid public health system so that I can 'trust the experts.' I'm an electrical engineer, I know nothing about vaccination and respiratory diseases compared to these guys. I still commit myself to getting info I feel is trustworthy and 'crank-free,' but it would be a hell of a lot easier if the actual experts would do their jobs and give us the truth, as messy and complicated as it can be at times.
All this really sucks. I'm an engineer, science is one of my favorite subjects. The work of good scientists makes my life possible. The problem is that scientists are, like all of us, flawed human beings, driven at times by pride, greed, bad incentives, etc. The replication crisis has given me a deeply skeptical view of the whole system, which is a place I never ever wanted to be in. Whether the Trump/Musk/DOGE alliance is good for science in the long run remains to be seen, but the system is badly in need of disruption, and it might be that Trump shock therapy is the only way through. I will definitely be checking out the book.
Someone once told me that credibility is gained in drops and lost in buckets. The people blaming everything on misinformation and disinformation don’t seem to realize that their buckets are empty.
Remember when you’d have social media posts deleted for simply mentioning the possibility of a lab leak? Most authoritarian moment of my 50 years, and it didn’t come from the right.
I know a lot of academic scientists, and in the wake of freezing grants, the immediate rallying cry (among the ones I know) on social media was, "I'm a job creator! They are freezing jobs! What about all the graduate students I provide for!" And even as I'm for science, I just had to laugh and laugh because, yeah, you create jobs, temporary ones without benefits, with low pay and long hours, and you will expect that most of your students will not advance in science and you treat them contemptuously for it while being cruel to anyone who proactive seeks employment anywhere else. You will not provide any meaningful management or mentoring, only scorn for never being good enough or working hard enough.
What kind of job is that?
I know its just a tiny slice of the puzzle, and I'm sure there are wonderful scientists out there, but there are so many levels at which they have tarnished their reputation.
Science (and the government) is a brick house (stick with me, here). It's solid, serves a purpose, and we like it (or at least are used to it, and have basic and fundamental expectations of it as a house).
It started as a one bedroom hut that has been built brick-by-brick into a mega-mansion that has spread from its lot into the adjacent lots, a shack that has soared into a skyscraper. Underneath it all, the foundation has been deepened, and sub-basements have been excavated, many layers beneath the earth. Tunnels have been built from it to other neighborhoods where other huts have been built brick-by-brick in those places.
Various architects and interior designers have come on board to put their mark on the building--all to make it "better."
All of this happened one brick at a time, one shovelful at a time. We barely noticed it, since it happened when our parents were children, then when we were children, and now while our kids are children. Slowly, over time.
I paid for a brick or two in 1987 (arbitrary dates--don't read into them) when they told me that they needed a small extra wing that would have a nice fitness center in it that I might be able to use. *You* paid for a few of them in 1998 when they said the water line was contaminated, but they would be putting in a well to tap an aquifer, and you could drink water from their drinking fountain (for free!). In 2006 they asked us to pay for a brick so that they could build a room for their security staff to sleep in to protect all the bricks we and our parents and our parent's parents paid for. And the security staff now also is there to protect *us* if we need it! How nice to be safe and secure.
The security staff wants to keep us safe. So they look for all sorts of risks. Everything is a risk--and the building owners certainly don't want anyone to be hurt on their property. You're safe when you visit that house. Really, really, really safe.
We like the building. Some really good things come out of it. It's not beautiful, but it's nice enough. People we know live and work in that house--chefs, maids, architects, groundskeepers, window-washers, plumbers, and much much more.
They rely on it, and their families rely on the work that the house provides them. In fact, that house is the biggest employer in the neighborhood--and you and I are proud we paid for a brick or two to build it!
But someone came along and started calling this giant house an eyesore. A McMansion. Too big for the neighborhood--and does anyone *really* know what is going on inside there? It never gets smaller, it never undergoes significant re-design or modernization. But it sure does keep getting bigger. What are all those people doing in there, he asked?
Why do we have to show an ID when we're a guest there? Does everyone in the house REALLY need to work there? Do they really need that many maids, or cooks, or personal assistants? Is the security staff really focusing on the actual security needs, or is it a self-perpetuating function that is bigger than it needs to be?
We're done asking those questions--we've asked them for decades, and we know the answer is that the building really is too big. It doesn't add to the neighborhood as much as it costs us. There are some hinkey things that we've heard about that go on in there. But it's too big to move.
We commission a bulldozer to raze the parts of the building that are on our neighbor's lots. Were starting to fill in the basement with water. A sledgehammer is coming out since the building owners didn't respond to our complaints or lawsuits. We're going to use those bricks for something else and right-size the building again.
As a teacher, I feel more or less the exact same way about education. Do I want Trump and Musk to come in to the education sphere with their sledgehammer approach? No. Do I think the Republican views on education are all correct? No. But do we have deep, fundamental problems in our education system that should cause significant reflection and change? Oh yes.
Trump does scare me, I don't like him and could never vote for him, but since we are here, I keep hoping all of this will seriously shake things up.
I'm pretty much in the same place
This is so true! Do you think reform is possible without tearing it down (at least pretty much) first? I've been asking myself this question a lot in recent weeks. I want to think it is, but my gut feeling is that maybe it's not...
I don’t know. There’s such a mindset shift required- we new to embrace a lower-case conservative approach. Teach in a manner that we know works. Don’t advance kids to the next grade if they can’t prove they can handle the current work. Track/stream kids to some degree based on an ability. Acknowledge that students will sometimes fail, sometimes not graduate. Raise the bar and help most students get over it, stop lowering the bar and dragging all kids over it.
I have a hard time seeing a progressive bureaucracy doing any of this
There's nothing more revealing then the chart that shows DoE spending vs. achievement. Yes, I'm aware some of the extra spending has helped some people, particularly the disabled, to have somewhat better educational outcomes. But even there...how have those improved education outcomes translated to better lives than pre-DoE?
Yes, please sledgehammer it. Day and night. Until it is rubble.
I don't think many things are fixed with sledgehammers.
The education establishment is out of time. Any parent who can get their kids out of public schools is doing so.
I’ll personally go without to make sure my grandchildren never step foot in a bureaucratic school. Fortunately my daughter and son in law made provisions before they had kids that allow them a great deal of flexibility in education.
It's not all bad. I'm a good teacher, and many of my colleagues are too. My daughters go to public school. But there is undeniably institutional rot
James K.,
I think this brief essay may interest you......look especially at how school district are cutting the scores needed to be called "proficient".........Haven't such things been going on for a while?
https://www.thefp.com/p/american-educators-lowering-cut-scores-declining-standards-reading-math
Thanks for this, it is indeed interesting. I can also add from my own personal experience that last year the College Board gave in and significantly raised the passing rates on many AP exams
It is frustrating that the response to cratering public trust is to cry "disinformation!", or insist that Trump is worse, or whine about how the modern education system churns out scientific illiterates, and never "maybe we need to ensure we behave in a trustworthy manner". The issues that plague science are well-founded and well-publicized. It certainly puts one in a conspiratorial mindset when these issues are raised again and again and again and again, and the only response is a closing of ranks and mealy-mouthed mumbling. Police, on the whole, *welcomed* body cams. Why do scientists appear so reluctant to embrace the equivalent?
Thank you for the book rec. I've found this entire area morbidly fascinating. Science is difficult, especially the sorts of questions we're putting to it nowadays. But we've made it so much more difficult by allowing mass corruption of the entire process to set in. Many of the fixes would be relatively simple! But they're not being implemented.
Whenever I hear "disinformation" alarm bells go off.
It feels like a word that was made up recently I've been watching some TV from the 1990s and I'll hear the word every once in a while.
This kind of broad-based reappraisal is challenging in the face of so many bad-faith populist attacks. For the same reason, Jesse is bummed out by the coincidence of Trump and the release of this Alzheimer's book
Our elites stink.
Halfway through this book now. We have basically lost my mother in law to advanced dementia. She was the sweetest woman in the world and now there's nothing left of her. This whole story makes me really, really angry.
FWIW, this piece is why I love you. The only appropriate response to this stuff is to cling tightly to the truth, to what can be proven or disproven, and to focus down on root causes. All strength flows from those actions and any attempts to elide the necessity of “doing the work” can only end in collapse.
We need some sort of adversarial incentive system in science. People need to feel real rewards for finding errors and for calling bullshit in their own life’s work. Anything less than that, as I’ve thought about this, is going to leave the problem unaddressed.
This adversarial approach is what I was raised to believe science *was*. I remain dumbfounded how "do the work" has become a retort against rigor, and "critical thinking" is a field that handwaves logic and causality.
The ELI5 of science is “I did a thing and another guy who I don’t know follows the exact same steps I followed and also observed the same thing happened, or if he doesn’t he argues with me about my steps.”
It’s not always that simple, and people like Adam Mastroaonni (sp?) do really good work in exploring differences in how science has worked historically.
I point this out not to be a pedant, but because turning science into a “cookbook” has been part of the problem.
Of course all true science is autistic rich guys sending each other letters.
It is so hard to get funding for replication studies. And then good luck getting it published. It’s so frustrating.
Years ago, the Gates Foundation funded genomics curation grants where the purpose was to go through the published genome of whatever organism and look for errors like misassembly, contamination from the human genome, sequencing vectors etc and sequencing errors. This was a big deal because it was hrs to ge that kind of funding from other sources. And these kind of things could be a big deal so it needs to be funded.
Academic journal publishing is such a con that I'm surprised Trump hasn't started his own publishing house.
Researchers get the money through grants and do the research. They then try to get it published in a good journal. The journal sends the article to other researchers for peer review. They do this for free (or in reality pass it off to a grad student) and then recommend (or not) for the article to be published. Article may even be published if the review says that it's crap and shouldn't be published. Article is published and libraries pay the journal a fuck-ton of money so that other researchers and students can access the article. Or authors can pay the journal so that researchers can access their article.
Now that nearly all journals are online, and many are online only, they don't have the overhead of paying for printing physical copies and all of the overhead that goes with that.
Oh and if the library decides to cancel their subscription as the yearly price hike has gotten to be too much, they loose online access to all of the previous years of the journal even though they had paid for them.
Wankers
We have to just bake this into the pie. However expensive it might be, just the thought of it will straighten everyone out.
also see "blind spots" by Makary--excellent book.
I trust the science.
As you note, scientific institutions are not always acting in support of science. People are being told to trust experts based on their credentials rather than on the accuracy of what they say, and research journals, their colleagues, news media and the public are doing so. The journals and colleagues should have stopped this at the outset.
Here's from one of those Yale essays (Boulware et al, 2022): "In this report, we cite studies that are peer-reviewed, up to date, conducted by respected investigators, and published in high-impact journals that are widely read. This represents the highest-quality evidence available to physicians making treatment decisions in this context."
No...the way you figure out quality of a study is by **looking at the study** and evaluating it rigorously for bias and various shortcomings. Evidence based medicine has been the way since the 90's. You don't look at how famous the author is and how important the journal is, although those should be correlated.
In gender medicine, many journals are deferring to the people at high prestige institutions and the latter are unreliable (as one might say, not doing science, witness the Chen et al paper or the McNamara et al Yale critique of Cass ).
You rebutted both quite thoroughly, here are rebuttals of the latter ( https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/yales-integrity-project-is-spreading, also 2 peer reviewed articles --
https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/10/15/archdischild-2024-327994
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2025.2455133 ).
The authors have the name, prestige, but not the science--McNamara (Yale), Turban (UCSF), Olson-Kennedy (USC)--their critique of the Cass Review that was so error laden that none of these rebuttals had room to cover all of the problems. The science is doing just fine, thank you.
It's a closed loop. We are right not to trust these institutions if they are not doing their job, and they aren't. The problem isn't with science, it's with the people pretending to do it and all those who are colluding in covering up what they actually are doing. In gender medicine this currently includes most of the journals, and most of the "major medical associations," all of whom could fix this by sticking to their claimed missions. For instance, how about recommendations based upon systematic reviews of the evidence instead of suppressing the review outcomes when they didn't like them (as you reported in the Economist, and the BMJ followed up?):
https://segm.org/The-Economist-WPATH-Research-Trans-Medicine-Manipulated
https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2227
The distinction is getting lost in the havoc, but those doubling down to back up researchers, journals and institutions who aren't following the rules of science but claiming its mantle of authority are making it worse.
Oooh "People are being told to trust experts based on their credentials rather than on the accuracy of what they say" That's perfect.
In a limited way, what I do touches on critical appraisal and I always make sure to point out that just because something has been cited a lot does NOT mean it's good research. Maybe a lot of other pubs are pointing out the flaws in it. I think critical appraisal and critical thinking are something that should be taught from kindergarten onwards.
For anyone interested in critical appraisal when it comes to research - particularly biomedical research, check out CASP - https://casp-uk.net/casp-tools-checklists/. Very, very helpful.
Also, in my experience a lot of people who should know what a systematic review is, don't. Or don't really understand the process that a good systematic review should go through.
I honestly don't know why anyone's surprised by this.
Most Americans aren't aware of the high-level controversies among scientists, or swayed by research scandals, or outraged by the replicability crisis. For average folks, their most common encounter with a scientist in a white coat is a doctor. And they are PISSED at that person, and that white coat.
Doctors fail most of us now, daily and catastrophically. If you are overweight (and that's two-thirds of us), they will outright deny you care until you "go lose some weight" -- a feat that, statistically, literally one in a hundred people will ever pull off permanently without surgery or GLP-1s (the only treatments that actually work). If you are female, doctors will categorically write off most of your complaints as meaningless. (The average woman with endometriosis needs 14 office visits before she gets diagnosed. ) Woe betide you if you are both overweight and female; odds are good that you'll leave the office with your issues unaddressed, and probably feeling like total crap about yourself as well. If you're also black and pregnant...well, we all know how that one ends.
For those who, by dint of gender, race, or mass, are deemed to merit better attention, there's still the lurking knowledge that the doctor is rationing your care based on what your insurance company is likely to pay for. Americans seldom get the best treatment. They get what the system will allow them to have, which is less every year. Knowing that our health is no longer the system's main priority doesn't add much to medicine's overall credibility. We all know there's another agenda at work now. We have learned that money trumps science every time.
And then the medical establishment is astonished when women who've been abused by this system (which is most of us; don't get us together in a room and talking, unless you've brought wine) decide not to take the doctor's advice about, say, vaccinating their kids, or wearing masks, or keeping them out of school. Why on earth should they believe someone who's being paid by insurance companies to deny us care, not listen to us, and refuse to tend to our issues? We know our well-being is not your first priority, Doc. We know someone, somewhere, is paying you to say that.
American medicine is great at problems that befall soldiers, athletes, and businessmen -- nobody tops us in acute care, orthopedics, or cardiology, and no doctors get paid more -- but horrible at tending to the common problems of women and the working class. Because of this, the rage non-white non-men feel about the abuses of US medical care is deep, personal, and pervasive.
And then you wonder why all these mistreated people don't think science is on their side. In their limited experience with "scientific" people, it hasn't been for a long, long time. So when other people in white coats stand up and try to tell them what's good for them, their first impulse is to tell them to fuck straight off. Because whoever it is you work for, Doctor, it sure as shit ain't me.
I feel like a lot of the veneration of science sprang from the New Atheism movement in the aughts. All of a sudden science, and the materialist view in general, became a central worship of many atheists - and I'll admit, myself included. I simply replaced religion with science.
Of course any discipline that becomes venerated will have rot start to take hold. People are too fallible and there is often a lot of money and prestige at stake.
I highly recommend "The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan (might have been the last book he published; it reads like a coda or sorts), c. 1997, so just before Dawkins, et al really burst on the scene. It is not doctrinaire, and it is both humble and in awe of what we have been able to do as people putting together this tool called "science".
And here I thought the veneration of science had its roots in the work of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Watson and Crick and other foundational figures.
SciAm has published multiple articles stating that human sex isn't binary.
That's not rooted in science. There's been a shift from science as most of us know it to Science™.
That shift has all the hallmarks of a religious movement. It's why Jerry Coyne is more relevant than ever.
Where has the impulse to *disprove* things gone? Isn't that central to "science?" Where are the rabid, dogged skeptics, and what reward is there for them?
It was my first spark of "love" for Jesse--his desire to disprove things earned my trust and devotion. Keep plugging away Jesse.
There is no value in it - replications will not favor you among the research in-group, and they won't win you tenure.
Years ago, there was this this paper by Brosnan and deWaal about how monkeys reject unequal pay. The experiment looks straightforward and high quality. It was published in Nature, and got TED talk level famous. https://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/publications/articles/Brosnan_deWaal_2003.pdf
I'm not interested in digging them all up now, but there were like 4 replications, all in pretty non-prestigious journals, and no one could replicate it.
The establishment ignored the failed replications, taught the original paper as truth, and the original first author researcher is tenured and well paid at a fancy institution. The second author was already revered because he wrote a lot of popular science books about how primates aren't mean, they are nice and altruistic, and therefore people are inherently altruistic; this jived with some or other moral trend in science at this time, so he would be beyond question.
I'm sure everyone who did a replication is not a professional scientist now.
That's how it goes.
I think that's my point. "What reward is there for them?" The answer is apparently "None." There should be. We should herald the heros who disprove every scientific claim out there. Instead of being sold drugs that sorta-work we should be sold solid science that tells us how they don't fully work. We all should hunger for what we're NOT being told, or emphasize the gaps in the findings/research.
Those are the heroes. And they'll make TRUE heroes out of scientists that do good, unassailable, solid research with conservative, honest, replicable findings.
Until then it's all just words on a page and employment security for the weakest.
It would be pretty easy to change funding mechanisms to favor replications and engineering over original science.
People trying to disprove false claims are often being muzzled. Science is fine. The scientific process is fine. But...it is not what is happening here.
Unfortunately, the government also bears some responsibility for the mess as a result of doing things like distributing grants based on the applicant's stated commitment to advancing DEI. Small wonder that people became less trusting of science when those responsible for choosing which studies would be funded did so based on partisan ideology. Some universities have used similar criteria when choosing who to hire, thus influencing what studies are proposed in the first place.
I just spoke with someone who does grants for a non-science area (so not apples to apples) who had to go through all their proposals and strip various terms. Some terms such as “disadvantaged” made the cut and remain, but the general mood was that this is just a song and dance to get to the same place (the grant money). We shall see, I guess.
It would be nice if we could have institutions that both accepted race as a concept with real world impact but not demand that every area of inquiry demonstrate how race applies to it.
Agreed. The issue (in my eyes, anyway) was never that race was being discussed, but that adherence to certain contested views on how to deal with inequality was demanded, even in areas completely unrelated to it.
When you speak of the actions of Musk and Trump you are agitated about the immediate impact, the "hatchet" and the broken flask headline image. More than just current science projects, they are changing the process. They are adding transparency by doing very public audits. It will be very difficult to go back to doing the business of science behind a curtain. There is creative destruction going on. If it leads to a permanent better process for government involvement in science, it will be many times worth the cost.
"They are adding transparency by doing very public audits."
This just isn't true, unfortunately. They (by which I mean mostly Musk) are posting out-of-context snippets online, often misunderstood. If the Trump administration wanted to do real, independent audits of our science funding, they would have had vast power to do so. That isn't the path they chose. We know this because of how swift it has been -- actual audits take time.
DOGE itself is immune from FOIA requests for ten years, as its legal status in the government has been carefully chosen to make it immune to congressional oversight and FOIA requests. The group will dissolve in two years, a deadline which allows it to shut down just before a potential future Democratic congress is inaugurated which might eliminate these protections. Very transparent!
Out of context snippets is correct. That is not the end result. They are in the middle of an audit of which the result will be public. We are talking about something that started literally days ago and you are expecting the final product to be produced yesterday. Give it some time. And yes there is misunderstanding as much of this was not previously accessible. As more people have more time to digest it, inconsistencies will be ironed out. More information better, yes? This isn't a one shot deal. The end result will support audits each subsequent year, not just this year.
It was all accessible. The only time it wasn't accessible was when Trump et. al. temporarily shut it down.
Please, tell me where I find the very public audits that formed the basis for Musk's obliteration of the U.S.A.I.D. Also, point me to the windows where I can view the Musk team's transparent audit process in real time or at all.
I don't know how the process works (I'm not a US citizen), but I'm under the impression all this much talked about "transparency" and "auditing" has always been on the public record, no?
Like, all the horrible USAID spending was published transparently on their website (till Musk took it down) for everyone to see.
Now there's a slew of self-proclaimed "auditors" tweeting such and such line of spending, as if they were discovering an incredible secret, which was out in the open, all along!
Isn't it the same case, here?
The Department of Defense has been unable to pass a yearly audit for seven years -- 7 years. Clearly they are not even trying. Payments missing details of who and why make it impossible to reconcile payments with intentions. Did NIH fund gain of function research? We have spent years trying to decide that. Even harder in USAID where large amounts of money are paid to NGOs with zero accountability of where the money goes or whether the desired goal is actually achieved. Some of this was visible but without a complete audit it is difficult to contextualize it and thus up to this point little was accomplished. People were getting used to shrugging their shoulders and concluding the government is too big to understand. We have reached a tipping point where people see that an audit can be done, it can be understood. As a result we have an enormous focus on how the government is spending money. Now that the information is more fully transparent, any one can see and comment. Sort of like a democracy.
One of the biggest contractors of the Department of Defense is... Elon Musk!
That one will surely never, ever, be audited or rendered public so we can see all of his shenanigans.
This isn't about "transparency" and accountability: it's a power move from an unelected Broligarch breaking numerous laws in order to beat down all the public servants, force consent, uproot real democrats and load the government with sycophants.
I'll believe you and retract everything I said, once Musk publishes his contracts with the Department of Defense.
Until that happens, the US sorta has an oligarchy, not a democracy.
For last 5 years Lockheed Martin is the largest defense contractor at $234 billion. For the same time span SpaceX defense contracts are $2.85 billion, not one of the biggest.
Here is the list of contracts I was able to find:
Classified Contract (2021): $1.8 billion
Starshield Contract with U.S. Space Force (2023): Up to $70 million
NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 (2024): $733.5 million
Rocket Cargo Program (2022): $102 million
Missile-Warning Satellites (2020): $149 million
Large defense contracts to well known companies are hard to hide.
True. However, the total of government subsidies to Tesla and Space X add up to 18 Bn$ in Federal Contracts (https://abcnews.go.com/US/musk-works-slash-federal-spending-firms-received-billions/story?id=118589121), and Musk seems hell-bent on gutting institutions that regulate his companies, which seems extremely dangerous: (https://abcnews.go.com/US/musk-works-slash-federal-spending-firms-received-billions/story?id=118589121).
This looks more like the moves of a Russian oligarch doing Putin's bidding, than a bona fide democrat trying to "audit corruption" or whatever. I think it's really naïve to trust this guy or think he has your (our) best interests in mind.
I find myself constantly pointing out that Letting problems like this fester empowers the cranks. If a crank pints out a real problem that institutions ignore, brush aside or deny, that means there was one time that the crank was right. A crank who was right at least one time will have a much easier time convincing people that their crank ideas are correct.
We saw this with the mishandling of the mRNA-induced myocarditis. Our health officials didn’t talk much about it and the. Insisted that the benefits outweighed the risks (for most people but not say for a 20 year old male who’s already had Covid) so the cranks had a chance to be right when the institutions were fumbling
This one is what really disillusioned me. I got covid pre-vaccine in October of 2020 and got over it without any drugs stronger than ibuprofin. I got the vaccine in April 2021 when I was a 27 year old, healthy man. I never had any complications from it far as I can tell, but I think with the knowledge we have today I would have declined the vaccine. I also never got any boosters. The covid vaccine was a medical marvel that saved a lot of lives, and also a tool that was not one-size-fits-all solution. As a result I trust public health experts a lot less, and that is a damn shame.
That is a totally reasonable decision.
I think public health and many highly educated liberals lost the plot when they emphasized the collective benefit and downplayed the individual benefit. For infectious agents like Measles, the collective benefit is bigger now because nearly everyone has immunity. Once you have a lower level of immunity, the individual benefit will become more prominent. But, the individual benefit from the measles vaccine is huge, so it is pretty easy to sell the vaccine on an individual benefit level.
With Covid and other respiratory viruses, with naturla immunity you get reinfected ever 1-3 years so there was no reason to expect that they would have a major effect on Covid transmission for very long. Vaccines against respiratory viruses like flu and Covid primarily benefit the person who gets the vaccine. And that’s great, but insisting that people who are either not going to benefit or have a very small benefit need to get a vaccine because it should cut down on transmission by some amount is not a reasonable argument.
What is interesting is that since Covid I’ve noticed that more and more highly educated non-scientists see vaccines primarily a collective interventions. I’ve been repeatedly assured that flu vaccines don’t work unless enough people get them. Which isn’t true. If you get the vaccine it will protect you to some degree against disease but you don’t get much in the way of sterilizing immunity from the vaccine.
When health officials and media repeat this claim it erodes their credibility further. And we’re in even more trouble if cranks or crank-adjacent types start pointing that out
That was actually my rationale at the time for getting the vaccine - I got it because I thought it would cut down on transmission, and it was to benefit the people around me. I knew at the time that it probably wouldn't help me beat the virus any better since I had been previously infected. Once it came out it didn't really help with transmission, well, yeah. I was incredibly pissed, especially since it turned out I was part of the group at highest risk for myocarditis.
I want a solid public health system so that I can 'trust the experts.' I'm an electrical engineer, I know nothing about vaccination and respiratory diseases compared to these guys. I still commit myself to getting info I feel is trustworthy and 'crank-free,' but it would be a hell of a lot easier if the actual experts would do their jobs and give us the truth, as messy and complicated as it can be at times.
All this really sucks. I'm an engineer, science is one of my favorite subjects. The work of good scientists makes my life possible. The problem is that scientists are, like all of us, flawed human beings, driven at times by pride, greed, bad incentives, etc. The replication crisis has given me a deeply skeptical view of the whole system, which is a place I never ever wanted to be in. Whether the Trump/Musk/DOGE alliance is good for science in the long run remains to be seen, but the system is badly in need of disruption, and it might be that Trump shock therapy is the only way through. I will definitely be checking out the book.
Someone once told me that credibility is gained in drops and lost in buckets. The people blaming everything on misinformation and disinformation don’t seem to realize that their buckets are empty.
Remember when you’d have social media posts deleted for simply mentioning the possibility of a lab leak? Most authoritarian moment of my 50 years, and it didn’t come from the right.
Not the reckoning we wanted, but the reckoning we deserved.
I know a lot of academic scientists, and in the wake of freezing grants, the immediate rallying cry (among the ones I know) on social media was, "I'm a job creator! They are freezing jobs! What about all the graduate students I provide for!" And even as I'm for science, I just had to laugh and laugh because, yeah, you create jobs, temporary ones without benefits, with low pay and long hours, and you will expect that most of your students will not advance in science and you treat them contemptuously for it while being cruel to anyone who proactive seeks employment anywhere else. You will not provide any meaningful management or mentoring, only scorn for never being good enough or working hard enough.
What kind of job is that?
I know its just a tiny slice of the puzzle, and I'm sure there are wonderful scientists out there, but there are so many levels at which they have tarnished their reputation.
Science (and the government) is a brick house (stick with me, here). It's solid, serves a purpose, and we like it (or at least are used to it, and have basic and fundamental expectations of it as a house).
It started as a one bedroom hut that has been built brick-by-brick into a mega-mansion that has spread from its lot into the adjacent lots, a shack that has soared into a skyscraper. Underneath it all, the foundation has been deepened, and sub-basements have been excavated, many layers beneath the earth. Tunnels have been built from it to other neighborhoods where other huts have been built brick-by-brick in those places.
Various architects and interior designers have come on board to put their mark on the building--all to make it "better."
All of this happened one brick at a time, one shovelful at a time. We barely noticed it, since it happened when our parents were children, then when we were children, and now while our kids are children. Slowly, over time.
I paid for a brick or two in 1987 (arbitrary dates--don't read into them) when they told me that they needed a small extra wing that would have a nice fitness center in it that I might be able to use. *You* paid for a few of them in 1998 when they said the water line was contaminated, but they would be putting in a well to tap an aquifer, and you could drink water from their drinking fountain (for free!). In 2006 they asked us to pay for a brick so that they could build a room for their security staff to sleep in to protect all the bricks we and our parents and our parent's parents paid for. And the security staff now also is there to protect *us* if we need it! How nice to be safe and secure.
The security staff wants to keep us safe. So they look for all sorts of risks. Everything is a risk--and the building owners certainly don't want anyone to be hurt on their property. You're safe when you visit that house. Really, really, really safe.
We like the building. Some really good things come out of it. It's not beautiful, but it's nice enough. People we know live and work in that house--chefs, maids, architects, groundskeepers, window-washers, plumbers, and much much more.
They rely on it, and their families rely on the work that the house provides them. In fact, that house is the biggest employer in the neighborhood--and you and I are proud we paid for a brick or two to build it!
But someone came along and started calling this giant house an eyesore. A McMansion. Too big for the neighborhood--and does anyone *really* know what is going on inside there? It never gets smaller, it never undergoes significant re-design or modernization. But it sure does keep getting bigger. What are all those people doing in there, he asked?
Why do we have to show an ID when we're a guest there? Does everyone in the house REALLY need to work there? Do they really need that many maids, or cooks, or personal assistants? Is the security staff really focusing on the actual security needs, or is it a self-perpetuating function that is bigger than it needs to be?
We're done asking those questions--we've asked them for decades, and we know the answer is that the building really is too big. It doesn't add to the neighborhood as much as it costs us. There are some hinkey things that we've heard about that go on in there. But it's too big to move.
We commission a bulldozer to raze the parts of the building that are on our neighbor's lots. Were starting to fill in the basement with water. A sledgehammer is coming out since the building owners didn't respond to our complaints or lawsuits. We're going to use those bricks for something else and right-size the building again.
That's progress.