Hello everyone, hoping this isn't the wrong circle for this.
While I'm sure you're all more aware than me of the dubious quality of much of the research (and "research") used to prop up this ideology, to allow them to claim scientific consensus on their nonsense, as well as the pressures that have allowed it to go almost uncontested, I have a tiny bit of information to add to the pool.
I recently worked for a man who had previously been a longstanding political lobbyist in DC for various LGBTQ organizations, for decades. He would sometimes brag about how one of his primary roles was making up "studies" out of whole cloth for these organizations; inventing pretend institutions with pretend experts doing pretend studies, and wouldn't you know it, the pretend research always conclusively supported whatever it was they wanted politicians to believe about an issue. Things that would put the tobacco industry's old tricks to shame. He was proud of it, thought it was funny and clever; I was disgusted. I also have no doubt this is continuing beyond the role he played in it.
So my herculean task of a question is how do we help get the scientific process working again the way that it should? How do we bring back that willingness to look for holes, publish rebuttals, identify studies set up with the sole purpose of farming the desired data results rather than finding an answer to a question? How do we put a stop (or at least a slow) to ideological doctrine getting to masquerade as established science, and turning claimed scientists into an unquestionable priest class rather than proponents of science, a process that demands rigorous scrutiny and questioning to function? How do we call BS like what my ex boss engaged in out officially and prevent further harm to the credibility of the field? What platforms are needed?
Apologies again if this is the wrong circle for this; wanted to share my horror over this bit of information with people who can understand the magnitude of it, and maybe discuss what can realistically be done to combat it.
I increasingly have a sense that capitalism has outgrown science. This is most obvious in medicine, where the development of a scientific/biological framework delivered real gains and enabled the development of a biomedical goods and services industry. Now the industry is impatient with science, science - which has brought industry so much profit - is now a fetter on profits. The outsize tail is wagging the dog.
This makes a lot of sense. Without giving too much away, I get to be a fly on the wall for a lot of large industry players, including a ton of biomedical companies, and watch this play out a fair bit real time.
My first reaction was "satire". If they can do it, can we do it too (to make a point)?
More seriously, if you don't want science to replace religion, we need more scientific literacy. I don't know why we don't have it. Is it because most people aren't interested in STEM per se, or how STEM is presented in school? Is it the lack of debate in public? Is it the lower status of qualitative research (which more people will intuitively get, because we all reach saturation on some issues)?
I do love this comment, and think you have something here as at least a step towards a solution. Even just a more widespread understanding of what science IS (and isn't) and the basics of how the scientific process works could go a long way towards diffusing bad actors with hidden agendas; being able to actually read the studies themselves, not the pop science coverage that so often misrepresents findings, knowing the kinds of holes to look for. Think the biggest headwind here is that it's much more time consuming and less convenient to do due diligence to determine if data is actually high quality or not.
Could maybe help if we were able to start calling out the professional science fanboys(/famous science ambassadors) when they push junk that doesn't meet quality standards? Like Bill Nye, Adam Savage, even Neil DeGrasse Tyson getting real pushback when they use their platforms to peddle pseudoscience, call them on it when they haven't done their homework before claiming authority on an issue.
Separate science from capitalism as far as possible, though I realise this is a counsel of perfection.
The way a lot of these researchers work is that they initially produce some vague research/proposal which they sell to the relevant political entity to get funding. This already means that they are selling the conclusions way before they produce the actual research. As such, it means that if they don't produce the promised conclusions, the contractor won't fund them anymore. In other words, it is not up-to the social scientists to provide an honest case-study. Of course, it doesn't mean that that will always be the case: a lot of professors don't have to care about all these fundings because they might already be earning well or have job security via tenure.
So then the question is how do scientists manipulate the data to suit their conclusions without being called out. There are couple of reasons: For one, they all work on highly specialised topics, and the repeatability is almost impossible. The fact that they work on highly specialised topics mean that geniuses and experts outside their subculture cannot come and take a peak to see what's really going on (it still happens though). The fact that repeatability is impossible means that competing political entities cannot fund different groups in the same subculture to cross-check each other. So these two things guarantee that even if they did something shady, there won't be anyone who can call them out.
So even if they can't really be called out, how do they make their research sound credible? That's simple because: > "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
They will start by picking a very specific phenomenon and gathering data and whatnot. After that, they can decide whichever conclusion they want to support, and can pick the statistical metric which will guarantee that conclusion. This works the other way around too: if there is a metric you want to maximise, there are all sorts of statistical magic you can do, drop the outliers, add weights on variables that suit the metric etc. This is also captured in the Goodhart's Law:
> "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
It is also almost impossible to start a dialogue revolving this because most disciplines treat statistics as a mere formality: to the extent, that some social science departments hire computer science students with no background in social science to "clean" the data. This means that the researchers themselves have no idea of what statistical tools they are using: their main concern is that the tools produce whatever they want.
But the main question is reception. The reason all these studies can support the doctrine is because there are loads of it, and scientists are treated as Gospels of Truth. You have a problem with that study? Well, there are 100s more supporting the same conclusion, you can't possibly be suggesting that all of them are wrong? They won't even have the same experiment: the mere fact that their conclusions support the same thing is enough for the masses because they are straight going to the conclusions section to see the interpretation presented by the researcher.
The only way we can stop the influence of science is to stop taking political assertions from scientists seriously because researchers can sound sciency to say whatever they want, and it will be almost impossible to refute due to the sheer volume of the research available and their ignorance of what statistical tools they are using, as evidenced in Brandolini's law: > "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
Thank you for the great, in-depth comment. Definitely things to think about.