The Hero and Scientific Inquiry
The hero
It’s a quiet, windy evening in the Kingdom of Heaven. At the doorway to his peaceful city the hero stands. The sun is setting and, with it, a summer of a thousand years — the night looms on the horizon.
He is clad in armor forged for him by his father and grandfather. His noble steed stood breathing heavily at his side, nervous. Behind him, in the darkening square, the people gathered, clutching tightly at their clothes, worried.
The hero hears a rumble and to his right. A part of the wall, unchanged and brittle from centuries of service, was starting to disintegrate.
From beyond the horizon, a loud growl drifts into the city. A long, terrible growl that hadn’t been heard for a thousand years — only myths and paintings told of its source— the great dragon.
Armed with the weapons of his forefathers and hastened by the vigor of his youth, the hero fastens his helmet, mounts his steed, and heads out into the encroaching darkness for the sake of his city and his people.
On his journey, he finds his treasured armor and weapons, beloved symbols of his family and heritage, to be cumbersome, rusty and old. He must soon forge new armor and weapons.
On his journey, only guided by the rumbling in the distance, he makes many mistakes, and travels down many wrong roads. He finds some of the knowledge passed down to him in the ancient texts, from landmarks to directions, to be outdated or downright wrong. So he adjusts, only guided by the general direction of his final goal — a new summer for the people of his city.
He fights the dragon, slays it, and takes the fire from it for his people. Triumphant, he returns home. He returns home, no longer the person that left. He has had to retool so many of the old ideas and armor that his people hardly recognize him. And yet, as he has the fire that they so desperately need, the people decide to take him back in. Within the walls, the fire brings warmth back to the kingdom, and a new dawn arrives over the mountains. The hero, with new knowledge, admired by some and despised by many for abandoning the old ways, begins to rebuild the walls with new material.
And thus, the city is safe, and the hero retires his new armor to the armory to be handed down to his son.
Scientific inquiry
Science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
Several weeks ago, I started an online program on Statistics and Data science online created by professors at Columbia University.
As the course began, we were given an overview of data science — a macro view of the history of data science, the applications of the subject, and the future of those who purse such an education.
As the course progressed into week two, we were presented with an interesting diagram that I recreated below. I recommend watching the relevant part of the video here.
The lesson and the diagram presented are conveyed mainly through the perspective of Data Science. One thing that stood out to me was that, in this description of the process, the methodology of analysis that is chosen is dependent on the assumptions made. In the process outlined above, the data that is generated is sent through the chosen method of analysis, to arrive at “solutions, knowledge, and business intelligence”, which I’m going to group together as information.
The lecture goes on to outline what this process would look like over several iterations. I’ve made a few changes and outlined that process below.
I’d like to take this one step further and modify the diagram above with some additions.
It’s not a stretch to see the similarity between the methodology of scientific inquiry and that of the journey of the mythic hero.
The rational, step-by-step procedures of scientific inquiry seem to me to be embedded in and born from this mythic human adventure in the material world. Science is the process of making mistakes in a calculated and measured manner to eliminate possibilities or revise previously held assumptions.
You can’t handle the truth
For decades, the scientific method has moved us along, systematically and reliably, towards an ever-greater understanding of the ways of the world. Scientists around the world are engaged in an enterprise that, more often than not, puts them in a situation where they have to completely retool their assumptions and hypotheses about the universe. It is not uncommon that a scientist will sacrifice decades of his life to one study or hypothesis, only to be proved wrong at the pearly gates. The reality is that scientists spend more time making mistakes than finding the correct answers.
Good scientists, like heroes, go after the truth, no matter what the cost — the truth is the desired state.
What you’re aiming at shades what you see in the world and the actions that you think you need to take. We take for granted one supremely important thing about great scientists — they always tell the truth. No matter what the results are, they tell the truth. Neither of the processes outlined above, the hero or the systematic method of inquiry, works without human beings endeavoring to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
We underestimate what it means “to science” because we don’t know what it takes for scientists to run good, honest experiments. To say nothing of the time, dedication, and effort needed to gather funding, scientists have to be willing to put their beloved hypotheses on the chopping block. Scientists are willing to let their ideas die if they are not true in the face of scrutiny.
None of the tools available for scientific inquiry work if you are not going to tell the truth.
The search for the truth is the foundation upon which the scientific method rests.
What happens when the hero gets killed?
CORRUPTION
a) dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people
b) inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means
c) a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct
d) decay, decomposition
Once the desired state changes, the entire process changes in a vicious feedback loop. It’s akin to making a rounding error in a 100-step math problem. Each subsequent iteration takes you further and further away from the answer.
Once the desired state changes from “find the truth” to “get a PhD”, “get published so I can gain status”, “I need to be right”, or “get paid” — it only takes one small deviation in any stage of the process to start a rapidly degenerating feedback loop.
Below is a graph that shows retractions of papers tracked by retractionwatch.com over the years for fake peer reviews. Keep in mind that this graph does not show the total number of papers per country. A more telling statistic would be the percentage of all published papers per country that are retracted. It’s also worth asking: how many papers didn’t get caught?
When the hero dies, you start seeing headlines like these:
Most Chinese scientists write academic papers to get promoted, survey finds
Inside the ‘shadowy world’ of China’s fake science research black market
The economy of fraud in academic publishing in China
China publishes more science research with fabricated peer-review than everyone else put together
Fraud scandals sap China’s dream of becoming a Science superpower
The image below shows the Corruption Perception Index for 2016 by transparency.org.
Correlation does not imply causation, but it comes as no surprise to me that the countries most “in the red” in the image above, are also the leaders in the graph shown before it.
Don’t feel bad
Most well-meaning people make the following erroneous assumption when they consider corruption in a country:
It’s the top brass, the government officials, and corporate CEOs that are corrupt, and as a result, are oppressing the poor hapless masses just doing their best to get by.
The problem with this train of thought, in my estimation, is the assumed disembodiment of those in authority from the rest of the population. Most people, especially those in the well-meaning developed countries of the world make this mistake in thinking.
Below is a map showing the distribution of net official development assistance and official aid received by countries of the world. You will see that there appears to be a tremendous overlap between the countries that receive the most foreign aid and the image above showing the countries ranked highest in the corruption index.
I mention this relationship to highlight the fact that corruption is not isolated to politicians and corporate CEOs. It is the common conception, at least of those well-meaning members of boards and charities, that aid given to these impoverished countries vanish due to the ineptitude, at best, or the corrupt nature of politicians and other officials. However, if you look at the countries leading the pack in retracted papers, they are also prominently featured in the map above showing the distribution of aid, as well as the map highlighting corruption. That is not to say that it is only corrupt countries that receive aid. It is, however, compelling evidence to show that corruption runs at all levels of public enterprise when the hero starts aiming at a detrimental desired state.
Scientific Excellence Mapping
The image below is a map produced by the team behind www.excellencemapping.net.
From the website:
“This web application visualizes scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas (and in “All areas”). For each institution (university or research-focused institution), the estimated probabilities of (i) publishing highly cited papers (Best Paper Rate) or (ii) publishing in the most influential journals (Best Journal Rate) are shown. Both probabilities, which can be adjusted by covariates, range from blue (high probability) through grey (average) to red (low probability) at a circle. The circle size corresponds to the institutional number of papers.”
The image below, set to “Best Journal Rate”, shows, compared to the corruption index data shown above, that the least corrupt areas of the world have the highest probability of having a scientific publication in the most influential journals, which are those that ranked in the first quartile (25%) of their subject categories (journal sets) as ordered by the SCImago Journal Rank SJR indicator.
The application allows for controlling for the following variables:
- Number of Academic Institutions
- Corruption Perception Index
- International Collaboration
- Gross Domestic Products
- Number of Residents
Below is the same map but controlling for corruption, which flattens out the probability of being published in an influential journal across countries to a large degree — controlling for corruption moves more of the countries out of both the red (low probability) and the blue (high probability) and into the grey (average probability).
Unsurprisingly, another excellent predictor for “scientific excellence” is GDP, which, when controlled for, brings more countries towards the grey probability, again from both ends of the spectrum. GDP and corruption have the two biggest effects on the probability of being publishing in an influential journal. That begs the question: are countries rich because they do research, or do they do more research because they are rich? I think it’s a vicious positive feedback loop — sustained as long as the hero aims at a noble, truthful desired state.
Why does any of this matter?
Let’s say that your grandmother has a recipe for her famous stew. It’s been passed down from her mother and her mother before her. It’s a mean stew. You’ve gotten your hands on it now. Let’s say that you’re a little on the open, mischievous side, and mess around with the recipe — a little dash of pepper here and a sprinkle of shenanigans there… The chances that you will ruin the recipe, and your dinner, are pretty high. On the other hand, there is also the chance that you will stumble upon an entirely different and delicious flavor. This is also, technically, corruption — “a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct”.
What if grandma’s recipe was causing a severe allergic reaction in your body? You would endeavor to find the offending ingredient and try to remove it. Again, technically corruption, but necessary, and results in a better outcome.
So what separates you, the adventurous kitchen maverick, from a scientist falsifying data? It’s not so much the means but the end that separates the two.
There is a reason that scientific papers from regions of the world like China and Pakistan are not likely to be published in influential journals — the science cannot be trusted.
The science cannot be trusted because the hero is dying or dead. The aim is not towards the enhancement of the current body of knowledge at all costs — including one’s own pride, money, and time. The aim is towards satisfying the expectations of one’s parents, appeasing the local political leaders, getting a promotion, or satisfying one’s own ego.
Through decades of small, incremental evolutions, we have, through the ever-improving process of science, been able to generate a systematic, portable, and reliable method of codifying the desirable actions of the hero. By doing so, we have unleashed from the latent potential of the natural world, information that has allowed us to transform our environment to a degree that, when examined with gratitude, is nothing short of magical.
For science to flourish, the practices and cultural norms have to facilitate an environment where one is not expected to be infallible. The embodied cultural norms, those that are acted out and not the ones merely espoused, need to be aiming at some honorable ideal. Science needs an environment that says “what we know is not all we need to know”.
On the one hand, we want our students to understand statistical significance. On the other, we want them to believe that going against anything the government says is heresy. This is exactly what is happening in the tyrannies of China, Pakistan, Saudi and Sri Lanka. The tyranny exists in the governments, in the families, and in the self. A lot of these cultures are trying to use the top-level, articulated processes of the hero to mean science, but without the foundation of moral values that support them. The result is fake peer reviews, falsified data, and retracted papers — corruption of the hero, of science.
The hero — the truthful, courageous, and fallible human being — is the seed from which the scientific process grows. Without the nurturing and encouragement of the hero, the scientific processes ceases to work — ceases to exist.
