Joining us today from the UK is Dr. Jerome Ravetz, a scholar and researcher who has written and taught about the history and philosophy of science for decades. We discuss the question of uncertainty in science and how that uncertainty is dealt with (or avoided) by the scientific community. We also discuss his latest article, “Sociology of science: Keep standards high” about how new technologies are changing the face of scientific discourse and what this democratization means for the future of science.

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Transcript

JAMES CORBETT: Welcome. This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com coming to you on the 20th of January 2012.

Today I’m joined on the line from the UK by Jerome Ravetz, a former professor of history and philosophy of science at Leeds University who has co-founded the Council for Science and Society and who has served on the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group.

He is the author of numerous works and scholarly texts, including Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems [1971], The Merger of Knowledge with Power: Essays in Critical Science [1990], Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy [1990, co-authored by Silvio Funtowicz], and many other books besides.

He also has a website at jerryravetz.co.uk.

Many of his writings are picked up both online and in journals around the world, including whatsupwiththat.com and nature.com, where his latest article, under the heading “Sociology of science,” is titled “Keep standards high.”

So, Jerry Ravetz, it’s great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining us.

JEROME RAVETZ: Good morning, and lovely to be here. Great privilege.

CORBETT: Well, it is a privilege to have you here to discuss one of my pet interests. It’s not something that I talk about on the program a great deal, but I really, really am fascinated by the philosophy of science. And obviously, you’ve done so much interesting work on that subject.

We did have a chance to talk, back in February of 2010, about the Climategate scandal that was unfolding at that time and some of its implications for the philosophy of science. But for people who didn’t hear that particular conversation, perhaps we can reintroduce you and some of the work you’ve done over the years on the problems of the philosophy of science.

RAVETZ: Okay. Well, philosophy of science is a big topic, and what I’m now seeing as crucial in moving philosophy of science forward is our management of uncertainty and ignorance.

As the philosophy and understanding of science has developed over the centuries, uncertainty has been there as something just to be tamed and put into a mathematical formula and tucked away in the calculations. And ignorance is something that really we don’t talk about in science. Obviously, if you ask an intelligent, aware scientist about uncertainty or ignorance, he or she will say, “Yes, of course, we know all about that. After all, progressive science is all about coping with ignorance and advancing the boundaries of knowledge. And so there is no problem.” And yet I think there is a sort of double-thinking that goes on, because when you come to science applied in the policy context—and I’ve noticed this most closely with the climate sciences—ignorance then becomes something which people are a bit nervous about.

My most clear, beautiful example there comes from a friend of mine in Australia, James Risbey, who with a colleague some years ago shaped up a set of descriptors of different sorts of uncertainty, because that had been recognized as a big problem in climate science. Anyway, they wrote this up. It was Risbey and [Milind] Kandlikar, K-A-N-D-L-I-K-A-R. A beautiful paper, where they describe the whole system, which has the great merit of being simple.

This went into the IPCC process, and it was adopted. So, of course, James was quite pleased. Well, then, when it came out, he found it and was a little bit surprised because there they certainly listed the five descriptors of deepening uncertainty.

And then number six wasn’t there. Number six is ignorance. And it was, like, in the IPCC, yes, they could handle the problem of managing uncertainty, but to make an explicit category for ignorance was something that they weren’t going to do.

More recently, I saw a beautiful, profound paper by two well-known authors, Leonard Smith, who is a brilliant statistician and probability theorist [who is] quite critical of malpractice and uncertainty management, and Sir Nicholas Stern, the economist who is the author of the important report. They had [this recent] paper with a much more developed analysis of uncertainty as it affects climate science. I thought, “Oh, let’s see what they say about ignorance.” It was not there to be mentioned.

So, I’m now beginning to feel, as the perpetual outsider and critic that I am, that if people don’t want to talk about something, that shows it’s really important (with no discredit to [Smith and Stern]). In other words, there’s something in that paradigm that can’t handle ignorance.

If you go back nearly 400 years to the founders of modern science like Descartes and Galileo, there you find this conviction that if only we do the mathematics, then we will have certainty.

So, our whole edifice of modern science, with all of its power, glory, and benefit for humanity, is built on this assumption that doing the research in a certain way is going to bring us home to certain truth. And, as I live with this year after year, I think, “Wow, this is a sort of a faith in a way.” The heresy, then, against this faith is to say that ignorance is not just out there to be conquered but is deep inside the system of knowledge and it exists there. If we repress ignorance, then, as Freud said, it’s going to return and blow up in our face.

As you know, I’ve lived with this Climategate thing. I still don’t understand it to my satisfaction. I’ve tried to explain in my own way what was going on. It’s hideously complex. But the thread that comes through is that it’s assumed that if you do the research, you get the results—then [the results] must tell you what’s going on. If other people come along and say, Well, I’m not sure about the quality of that research—or sometimes even the quality of the researchers—then this is all a mess. We don’t want to know. And since clearly saving mankind from mankind’s own follies in destroying the climate or whatever is such a good cause, those who then throw doubt are bad people. And since people who throw doubt have a bad history recently, you know, and obviously there have been people [like this].

I think Naomi Oreskes is a great example who has made a lot of this, showing that, time and time again, whenever there’s been a danger, then the interests who are making the danger, usually big business, come along and, as they said, they manufacture doubt. And so if some people were manufacturing doubt about cigarette smoke, why shouldn’t they have the same evil motives for manufacturing doubt about global warming?

That’s a totally plausible argument, a lot of evidence for it. But it then means that doubt becomes something that we’d rather not do, or doubt becomes suspicious in its own right. Then you have the mindset and you are down into the slippery slope to a huge mess.

So, I should say finally on that, sorry, I’m rambling a bit, there was Stephen Schneider, who was a very distinguished scientist, a very, very big man, who tried to bring the climate science practice into proper lines, appreciating uncertainty. [He had] full awareness of the problems of trying to activate a public when you know you don’t have absolute truth behind you. So he was all there on the understanding, and I think he worked himself to death. One of the most tragic events in the recent history of science. And I suspect, I won’t say any more, I suspect it’s because his audience, his own colleagues and his opponents—most of his opponents—simply didn’t want to know about deep uncertainty.

He had wonderful ideas, and yet people were too embattled by that point. He tried to fight the campaign with one hand and to make it a good, solid, scientifically, philosophically coherent campaign on the other. I think it was too much. This is all speculation. I never met him personally, unfortunately. But this is what, from the outside, I begin to suspect—partly because, as has been well said, in war, truth is the first casualty. We cannot afford to wash our dirty linen in public. We cannot afford to show our weakness to the enemy.

All these things are very good maxims of practice. But if you are fighting a battle using science, then your position becomes compromised and self-contradictory. Steve Schneider was well aware of this. He had that classic statement about the dilemmas. But to be aware of it, unfortunately, isn’t the same as being able to solve it. And so for me now, leaving aside scientists being overly enthusiastic or defensive or cutting corners or whatever, I now feel at the core of the whole thing was this failure to effectively manage uncertainty.

And then, just as an extra, we had the same phenomenon in the financial crash, where the theoreticians of the financial system had these very sophisticated models—highly sophisticated, hyper sophisticated—where they assumed: “If we have something we’ve never seen before, we don’t know how people will react. Then what we’ll do around the number, we’ll slap on a certain probability distribution—the Gaussian distribution—put that into the equations, churn the machine, then we’ll find everything’s okay.”

And then, of course, what happens is things that shouldn’t happen more than once in 10,000 years. Instead of saying “Is our calculus inappropriate?” they say, “You know, something’s gone wrong with the system.”

I think, there again, this is what I use as my most clear example of how when people, using mathematical tools, assume that they are just true facts and do not appreciate that they are powerful but dangerous tools, then they run into trouble. And since these tools deal with uncertainty, then this is where the contact with reality eventually blows up in your face.

How was that?

CORBETT: An extremely detailed answer. You’ve raised so many points that I would love to pick up on. So I will try my best to pick on some of the most important ones. But it raises to my mind the question, for example, you talk about the process by which a company or an industry could manufacture doubt in order to allow their product to be sold or something like that. And we saw that, for example, in the tobacco industry and things like that.

It raises to my mind the exact opposite of this process and whether that is possible too. Whether it’s possible to manufacture a certainty about a certain thing which is uncertain in order to propagate an idea that would be beneficial to certain business or financial interests.

Exactly as, for example, some of the banks and financial institutions monetarily profited from these phony schemes that were being used to try to sell these really toxic assets and things of that sort. Can that happen through the scientific process? Can certainty be manufactured in a way that people believe it’s something to be certain when in fact uncertainty remains?

RAVETZ: Yes, and unfortunately, I think a spurious certainty is built into our whole way of doing and thinking about science.

How should I start? Well, as I have written here and there, when a student is going through learning science, you are given the understanding by your experience—it never needs to be said—that for every scientific problem, there is just one correct answer, precise to several digits. You can go through [school], probably right up into a PhD from elementary school, never seeing a wrong answer in the book.

In other words, there is a right answer in the book, and if you don’t get it, that’s your problem. You are failing. Because in science, every problem has an answer—a one correct answer.

If you’re on a very good PhD course, you will learn that mistakes can happen and that you can try a line of research that leads you along for months and then you realize it’s wrong. But that is a luxury. I mean, I’m speaking here from experience. In my own PhD, this is what happened to me. But then in other PhD programs, you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. And so your supervisor ensures that you’ll be given something to do, which is pretty safe.

In other words, there have been so many people before you doing the same sort of thing. Now you take the same techniques, extend it to something else. We’re pretty sure it will work. You just have to learn how to twiddle the knobs a little bit. And then it’s original research, you get your degree. So you then come out with a PhD and you then go into the world, go into research, and you have never had the experience of error or failure.

You’ve been very smart up to that point. You go into the world. You have never seen a failed problem. Now, obviously, once you’re out there in the real world of research, then you start to learn, at some point, in some way, that things can go wrong. But this is always unfortunate because you’ve wasted time. You haven’t got a publication for all that work. The temptation is very strong to try another statistical test so that you do get a positive result.

So you then get this mindset, which is so deep that it doesn’t even have to be spoken, that if science always gets the right answers and if I have done my quantitative data, I’ve put on my mathematical model, what can be wrong?

So then, having got my qualifications, I go to work in the world of finance, and someone says, “Well, we need a model for this product,” [and you say,] “Oh, that’s okay.” So then you do this, you do that, you do this famous Gaussian copula. Out come the numbers. You can’t imagine what can be wrong, because you’ve never made a mistake before. You’ve never seen an error in science before. So the best . . . in the world . . . arch into, as it were, the jaws of death and error.

So, the whole scientific system of knowledge is biased in favor of certainty, even without any corporate selfish interest pushing it that way. Science accentuates the positive, eliminates the negative.

And when we now come into a period [such] as I’ve talked about, post-normal science, when facts are uncertain and values in dispute, people look at this and say, “What are you talking about? That’s not science.” I said, “Okay, what is it?”

So, we are in the beginning of revolution in scientific thought, where we scarcely have the tools to cope with the radical uncertainties that face science and in the application.

I mean, we can even take it back to climate. I’m very careful now not to accuse anybody of malpractice or stupidity or anything like that. That’s irrelevant. What we do have, though, is the assumption that if we can get some numbers, it’s measuring something.

Just recently, after all these years, I’ve begun to think, “Well, what is climate?” Climate is weather over a long period of time. Well, how long? Various scholars—there’s Hans von Storch in Germany, there’s Mike Hulme in England—have looked at this [and asked], “Well, what do we mean by climate?”

Climate is a very humanistic sort of idea. It isn’t pinned down by a set of measurements. Whether the climate is changing, you have to then say, “Well, what do we mean by climate?”

And again, if you have been trained up as a “puzzle-solving scientist,” as Thomas Kuhn described them, that sort of reflexive question is beyond you. You say, “Well, we all know what climate is. We measure it, you see.”

“Well, where do we get the global mean temperature?”

“What is the global mean temperature?”

“Oh well, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

It goes deeper and deeper into methodologies, which themselves can be contested. Your average scientists, who, as good—let’s say responsible—citizens, know that there is a problem. They find all that stuff to be manufactured doubt. You see, what’s the problem? We know there’s a climate, we see these things happening, and science gives us certainty—bar probability stuff. And all those other people, they’re just denying smoking kills.

And then you have this tragic situation we’re now in. And so, as I’m working it out—even talking to you—I see the core is this belief that science gives us that security that all problems can be solved with one unique answer, precise to several digits.

That’s why I feel philosophy of science is now very, very relevant.

CORBETT: I think so. Increasingly so. Certainly in this world, where things like climate science have become so central to a lot of government policies that threaten to really fundamentally change the fabric of our society in some ways.

On that note, let’s get into your most recent article about sociology of science: “Keep standards high,” talking about the ways that technology can transform and already have transformed to some extent the scientific discourse—and some of the promises and pitfalls of that.

RAVETZ: Well, this is all brand new stuff. I think it’s partly because of other interests of mine that I’ve picked up on the way that the new technology is transforming business practice— certainly transforming politics. That’s obvious. And now transforming business practice. We see it’s coming in at the fringes of science in all sorts of ways—some obvious ways. Digital media have many, many advantages for information over paper media.

There are lots of people who criticize science—who say it has become a new religion, that scientists are a new priesthood. Now, of course, we know that this is not a very close analogy. It can be very dangerous to take it too literally.

However, we can say that in the advanced societies, a belief in a certain sort of world, which is described by science rather than religion, is now standard. It has by no means conquered the whole world, but this is what is there in the parts of the world that are making it happen. Sorry, I’ve lost the thread. Giving too many apologies.

Yeah. Now, we also know that, to do science, you need to have a lengthy, expensive education. And even some years ago, I made this joke that if you look at a poor boy coming up from the slums, he has a better chance of being president of the United States of America than getting a Nobel Prize. Because if you don’t start early and have all the breaks, you’re never going to make it into science, you’re coming in too late.

So, although science is in many ways profoundly democratic—it’s very democratic in its practice, certainly more than business—it is open to talents to an exceptional degree. Still, science is part of what we might call the elite culture.

And, just as an aside, I think a lot of the motivation for the creationism debate—and I should say, I’m not a creationist—is damaging. On the other hand, you can see it as a reaction by a culturally underprivileged and oppressed class—people who don’t generally have access to elite education and the media of elite knowledge. This is their reaction: “You won’t take the Bible away from us. You’ve taken away everything else, but we’ve still got the Bible.”

Yes, they are wrong, but they are coming from a place that’s real. That’s a reminder that science is in some ways very democratic, in some ways not so democratic.

Now, then we look at this democratization of the media of knowledge. Certainly in all of the Arab world now, it’s happening. We see an increasingly sophisticated, powerful, radical movement using social media quite effectively in an ever-more-sophisticated and skilled way.

So, the terms of politics involving science at the moment as technique are changing fast. What I find most amusing is that one of the leading institutions in fostering this change is Stanford University, where, if you look at the website for Liberation Tech, that is based at Stanford. Now, one would wonder what the original Leland Stanford would have said to find his university enlisted in the bloggers and people, but that’s the way history goes.

What we’ve seen, and this was, I think, the most important thing: With my friend and colleague, Silvio Funtowicz, we developed the idea of post-normal science. We then talked about an extended peer community. There, we had the idea of citizen scientists, like, notoriously, in Lyme, Connecticut, or Woburn, Massachusetts, who found a problem that the official science establishment didn’t want to know. So they made their own science: “housewives epidemiology.”

But that was all very isolated. And at the time, it wasn’t significant for science. Maybe for public health, but not for science. The next stage—and I just learned from experience—the next stage: Along comes Climategate and all these guys blogging. This is where I dived in, at some cost, to sites like What’s Up With That or Judith Curry’s site in particular or Roger [Tattersall’s] Tallbloke’s [Talkshop] site, [where] people are having serious discussions.

There are doubtless sites out there where people are just mouthing off. [But] here you have serious discussions, enforcing a rule of civility. I mentioned this in the Nature paper. When people from the other side come in, they will be argued with, but always with consideration and courtesy. And real critical scientific discussion is taking place on these sites.

I should also say that when some of the more vigorous participants—on What’s Up With That, there’s this great character, Willis Eschenbach, who is always looking at everything—and when he gets it wrong, they tell him. “Nobody says, “Well, Willis is one of us.” Oh, no. They come in and say, “Willis, great stuff, but you made an elementary blunder.” So, it is by no means backscratching.

And then we see that there are more and more blogs all over the place. There are now the beginnings of significant amateur science of the sort we had a couple of hundred years ago. And all that is moving around. It’s all embryonic or nascent.

What we haven’t yet seen is research being done outside the academies. Again, here’s the information technology. Up to now, to do serious research, unless you chose your area quite carefully, frequently on something about safety and health. But if you want to do basic insider research, you had to have behind you millions and millions of dollars of capital. Either in a lab or a library or have a privileged access to those resources.

Somebody out on the street couldn’t do real research. They could do critical research, bits of local epidemiology, pollution, medicine, a little bit health, but not a real thing.

Now, that barrier is beginning to go. It’s only beginning to go. Also, the open criticism that we’ve seen in the Climategate thing will be moving further into science. What sort of effect it will have, I don’t know.

What we do know is that when you have an extension of democracy, it can be very rough, it can be destructive, it can be dangerous. But, in a way, it’s going to happen.

Whether my two interests here, uncertainty and ignorance on the one hand and the extension of democracy into science on the other hand, will mesh together, I really don’t know. The danger always is that the enthusiasts become radicals, become revolutionaries. For them, uncertainty is a burden they don’t want to carry. You could then have a polarization of a pro- and anti-establishment science, which can be very damaging. That can happen.

Actually, it happened. There is a history of political debate on science going back for centuries. We won’t go into it now, but perhaps the most notorious example, which has actually never been properly written up, to my knowledge, [was] in the French Revolution, [when] there was a critical oppositional scientist called [Jean-Paul] Marat.

He’s well remembered because he was assassinated in his bath. He had to stay in the bath. He had a skin disease. He was assassinated. There’s a wonderful world-famous painting of Marat in his bath by the artist [Jacques-Louis] David.

What is not so well-known is that Marat was really quite a distinguished scientist [who] had done lots of research on various things—had a lot of standing. He actually worked in England for a while and then turned against the Academy of Sciences, which was at the core of the revolution, because he felt that they were elitist. He was writing inflammatory pamphlets against these academicians, saying that they had betrayed the revolution, that they were elitists and were simply carrying on the old way. And that was all part of the radical shift in French politics, which wound up with the terror and people like Robespierre. But Marat was there. He was influential for a time. And then he was killed. And then science swung back.

But there have been other cases which are well-remembered. Recently, in the then-Soviet Union, there was the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who had wonderful ideas about improving agricultural practice, which got the political backing of Stalin. He used this position to get rid of the conventional geneticists in the Soviet Union, some of them being killed, some just going off to camps, never coming back. In the process he very nearly destroyed Soviet biology—all in the name of the people, popular science, craftsman science, socialism, all the good causes, and unfortunately he was a charlatan and a gangster. So yes, I am fully aware that things can go very, very wrong.

My position is, it’s happening. And the sooner that the world of science wakes up to this and begins to adjust to this new situation, the better.

If the world of science circles the wagons against this new political ferment in the way that it has circled the wagons against the climate critics, then I can see trouble ahead.

Okay, how’s that?

CORBETT: Well, absolutely a lot of information to think about there. And I think you’re right: I think we have seen a circling of the wagons already starting to take place. It will be very interesting to see how that develops.

So, finally, tonight—or this morning for you—would you say you are fundamentally pessimistic or optimistic about the chances for this democratization of science to have a positive effect on the future history of science?

RAVETZ: Well, I suppose it’s a matter of political instincts. I feel that democratization is a good thing. It can be very, very bumpy. I mean, look at the Protestant Reformation, which started off with a new medium of communication—namely, the printing press and the production of Bibles written in the vernacular so people could see what Jesus said as opposed to what the church was doing. And pamphlet literature, wow.

Things then exploded. You had a whole range of, what should I say, reforms. At one end, you had the English Henry VIII, who simply hijacked the whole machinery of the church in a very destructive and brutal way, all the way through nice reformers who just wanted people to be pious. And then, at the other end, you had people who were reading the book of Revelation and were sure that it’s all going to happen tomorrow and that the evildoers will be smashed.

And you then had, starting, let’s say, in the early 16th century, 150 years of real turmoil and huge destruction, more or less brought to an end in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Things settled down then, and then by the early 18th century, it was all settled. The Catholic Church was back in its cage, and Europe then went ahead. But it was a hell of a mess, with good and evil being totally mixed up.

By the end of that period, you had a new generation of people who were saying, “Religion, who needs religion?” And so what had started off as an attempt to reform the Catholic Church and get rid of its worst excesses ran out of control. You had everything going on, and at the end of it there was a general ferment of disillusion with religion as such.

Out of that came somebody like Spinoza, as a quick, well-known example. So what will happen now? I don’t know. I suppose it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. I think, as I mentioned in the Nature article, this new technology is realizing the ideals of science in some ways more effectively than the current practice of science itself. And that’s what’s very, very exciting.

Okay!

CORBETT: Exciting. Interesting. Intellectually provocative. I could talk with you about this for hours, but I think we’ll leave it there for now. Certainly I hope we can get you back on the program in the future to talk more on these issues. Dr. Jerome Ravetz, thank you again for your time today.

RAVETZ: And thank you. Right. Bye-bye for now.

 

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