On the corruption of science

Another good piece at Unherd: Science has become a cartel

With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality.

 Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus. The scientific paradigm they are invested in is typically superseded only when the scientists sitting atop the institutional hierarchy literally die, or retire. It is not “anti-science” to acknowledge this. Rather, the point is that one has to keep in mind that scientists are human beings first.

I wrote an essay on Kuhn and Poppler for my PGCE some years ago, recent events have added more evidence to the claims that science, esp. the peer-review system, is (like a lot of the modern world) fundamentally broken and in dire need of reform. Sadly this is unlikely to happen due to the current system incentivizing the status quo.