Case Western Reserve University

Stacy McGaugh

I started this blog as a place to discuss science, and have refrained
from discussing overtly political matters. This is no longer possible.
Today is June 10, 2020 -- the date set to strike for black lives. I want
to contribute in a tiny way by writing here. If that seems inappropriate
to you or otherwise makes you uncomfortable, then that probably means
that you need to read it and reflect on the reasons for your discomfort.

To start, I quote the
[statement](https://astronomy.case.edu/2020/06/08/blacklivesmatter/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} made by my colleagues and myself:

> The CWRU Department of Astronomy stands in solidarity with our Black
> colleagues and fellow citizens across the United States in expressing
> what should be a clear moral absolute: that people of color should
> enjoy the same freedoms as other Americans to life, liberty, and the
> pursuit of happiness. We condemn the de facto system of racial
> oppression that leads to pervasive police brutality up to and
> including the extrajudicial murders of Black Americans like George
> Floyd and far too many others.
>
> We strive to build an academic community that welcomes, encourages,
> and supports students and scientists of color. To achieve this goal,
> we recognize that we must continually reflect on the injustices faced
> by under-represented and marginalized people, and repair the
> institutional structures that place them at a disadvantage. We
> encourage our colleagues in astronomy, throughout academia, and more
> broadly across society to do the same.
>
> We will participate in the Strike for Black Lives this Wednesday, June
> 10, and encourage others to join us.

As the current chairperson of the [CWRU Department of
Astronomy](https://astronomy.case.edu/){target="_blank" rel="noopener"},
I was initially reluctant to post something about the Black Lives Matter
movement on the department website. It is a different thing to make a
statement on behalf of an organization of many people than it is to do
so for oneself. Moreover, we are a science entity, not a political one.
But we are also people, and cannot separate our humanity from our
vocation. There comes a point when way too much is ever so much more
than more than enough. We have reached such a point. So when I contacted
my colleagues about doing this, there was unanimous agreement and eager
consent to do so among all the faculty and scientific staff.

I value the freedom of speech enshrined in the first
[amendment](http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.htm)
of the constitution of the United States of America. I think it is worth
reproducing here:

### Amendment I

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
> prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
> speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
> assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech is often construed to mean the right to espouse
whatever opinion one might hold, and I think that is indeed an essential
personal freedom that Americans take for granted in a way that is rather
special in the history of humankind. Note also that the first amendment
explicitly includes *"the right of the people peaceably to assemble"* --
a right that Americans sometimes exercise but also frequently attempt to
deny to each other.

Why does this come up now? Well, if you haven't been keeping up with
current events, George Floyd died in custody after being arrested in
Minneapolis, sparking protests -- *peaceable assemblag*es -- across the
country and around the world.

In the last sentence, I intentionally use a misleading structure common
in both the press and in police reports: "George Floyd died...", as if
it were something that just happened, like a butterfly happening to pass
by. Indeed, the initial police report on the incident stated that Floyd
"seemed to be in medical distress" while omitting mention of any causal
factor for that distress. Similarly, the medical examiner's report
exonerated the police, attributing Floyd's death to "underlying medical
conditions."

That is some major league bullshit.

The cause of Floyd's death is not mysterious. Officer Derek Chauvin
crushed Floyd's windpipe by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and
forty six seconds. That is considerably longer than the longest TV
commercial break you have ever been modestly annoyed by. Who among us
has never raged *WILL THESE COMMERCIALS NEVER END?* Now imagine feeling
the life being crushed out of you for a considerably longer period while
lying flat on your belly with your hands already cuffed behind your
back. That's right -- George Floyd was already handcuffed and on the
ground while being pinned by the neck. In no way can this be construed
as resisting arrest. He was already under police control and in no
position to resist anything, up to and including being murdered.

A more accurate statement using the active voice would be "Police
arrested George Floyd, then brutally murdered him as he lay helplessly
handcuffed on the ground." There was an obvious  cause for his "medical
distress:" Derek Chauvin's knee and body weight. "Underlying conditions"
played no role. Before being pinned and crushed, Floyd was alive. After,
he was dead. It didn't matter if he had been suffering from terminal
cancer: that's not what killed him. Officer Chauvin did. There is no
*alleged* about it: we can all personally witness this heinous act
through now-ubiquitous video recordings.

The more puritanical grammarians might object that I am not merely using
the active voice that the police and coroner's report (and some press
accounts) take care to avoid. I am also using pejorative adverbs:
*brutally* and *helplessly*. Yes. Yes I am. Because those words apply.
If you want an illustration to go along with the dictionary definition
of these words, then go watch all 8:46 of the execution of George Floyd.

As egregious as this case is, it is not an isolated incident. That both
the police and coroner's reports whitewash the incident with
intentionally vague and passive language is a dead give away that this
is standard operating procedure. They've done it before. Many times. So
many times that there is a well-rehearsed language of obfuscation to
subvert the plain facts of the matter.

This event has sparked protests around the country because it
illustrates an all too familiar pattern of police behavior in black
communities. I've heard various people say things like "It can't be
*that* bad." Yet this systematic police brutality is what protesters are
saying is their life experience of being black in America. Are you in a
position to know better than they?

I've heard people say worse things. Like blaming the victim. Floyd was a
career criminal, so he deserved what he got. This is such a common
sentiment, apparently, that it affected a Google search I did the other
day. I was trying to look up a geology term, and got as far as typing
"geo" when Google auto-suggested

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Really? This is such a common conceit that the mere three letters g e o
leads Google to think I'm searching on George Floyd's criminal past? I
can think of a lot of more likely things to follow from g e o. Given the
timing, I can see how his name would come up quickly. Just his name. Why
add on "criminal past"? How many people must be doing that search for
this to be Google's *top hit? *

News flash: people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. It
is the purpose of police to apprehend *suspects* and that of the courts
and a jury of citizens to decide guilt or innocence. Whatever the
*alleged* crime, the punishment is not summary execution by the police
on the spot. As much as some few of them seem to want to be, the police
are not and should not be [Judge
Dredd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.

The same victim-blaming is going on with the protests. People have
assembled in communities all over the country to protest -- a right
guaranteed by the first amendment. As near as I can tell, most of these
assemblies have been peaceable. Given the righteous, raw anger over the
arbitrary state-abetted murder of American citizens, it is hardly
surprising that *some* of these assemblies devolve into riots. The odds
of this happening are seen time and again to be greatly enhanced when
the police show up to "keep order." All too often we have seen the
police act as the aggressors and instigators of violence. If you
*haven't* seen that, then you are not paying attention -- or not
following a credible news source. Fox, OANN, Breitbart, the Sinclair
broadcasting network -- these are not credible new sources. They are
propaganda machines that are keen on focusing attention on the bad
behavior of a minority of protesters in the hopes that you'll be
distracted from the police brutality that sparked the demonstrations in
the first place.

Victim-blaming is an excuse closet racists use to dodge engagement with
the real issue of police misconduct. "He was a career criminal! He
deserved it!" and "Riots are bad! Police must keep order and protect
property!" These are distractions from the real issue. Property is not
as important as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Black
Americans are not assured of any of those. When they peacefully assemble
to petition the government for a redress of grievances, they are met
with masses of police in riot gear hurling flash-bangs and teargas. Even
if a few of these assemblages lead to riots and some looting, *so what?*
That is *nothing* in comparison with existential threat to life and
liberty suffered by all too many Americans because of the color of their
skin.

An old friend tried to make the case to me that, basically, "mobs are
bad." I reacted poorly to his clueless but apparently sincere buy-in to
the misdirection of victim-blaming, and felt bad about it afterwards.
But he was wrong, in an absolute moral sense, and I have no patience
left for blaming the victim. Yes. Mobs are bad. Duh. But going straight
to that willfully misses the point. This didn't start with mob violence
out nowhere. It started with the systematic oppression of an entire
group of American citizens defined in literally the most superficial way
possible --  the pigmentation of their skin. The police have many roles
in our society, some for the good, some not. One of the bad roles has
been as enforcers of a *de facto* system of white supremacy -- a system
so deeply ingrained that most white people aren't even aware that it
exists.

I would like to believe, as many white folk apparently do, that white
supremacy is a thing of the past. An ugly chapter in our past now
relegated to the dustbin of history. Yet I look around and see that it
is alive and well all around us.

We -- all of us who are American citizens -- have an obligation to make
things better for our fellow citizens. At a very minimum, that means
listening to their concerns, not denying their experience. Just because
it is horrible doesn't make it untrue. So don't try to tell me about the
evils of riots and mobs until you first engage with the underlying
causes therefore. These are mere symptoms of the societal cancer that is
white supremacy. They are natural, inevitable reactions to decades upon
decades of degradation and disenfranchisement heaped on top of centuries
of dehumanization through slavery and lynchings. Until you acknowledge
and engage meaningfully with these brutal aspects of history and
modern-day reality, you have **zero** credibility to complain about any
of their toxic offspring. Doing so is a clear sign that you are part of
the problem.

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I started this blog as a place to discuss science, and have refrained from discussing overtly political matters. This is no longer possible. Today is June 10, 2020 – the date set to strike for black lives. I want to contribute in a tiny way by writing here. If that seems inappropriate to you or otherwise makes you uncomfortable, then that probably means that you need to read it and reflect on the reasons for your discomfort.

Black Lives Matter

Björn Brembs

With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired [Kelvin
Droegemeier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_Droegemeier) as
director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP) in February 2019. In a recent
[interview](https://www.aip.org/fyi/2019/interview-ostp-director-kelvin-droegemeier)
Dr. Droegemeier made the following broad, categorical statement in
response to a PLan S question:

> One of the things this government will not do is to tell researchers
> where they have to publish their papers. That is absolutely up to the
> scholar who's doing the publication. There's just no question about
> that.  
>   
> \[...\]  
>   
> This goes back to the president's fundamental philosophy of let's not
> shackle people, let's let them be free to choose where they publish.
> Let's not put any administrative constraints on them.

As [Hanlon's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
requires to first rule out incompetence before attributing malice to any
action, one needs to assess the competence of Dr. Droegemeier with
regard to such sweeping policy statements. On his Wikipedia entry one
can find numerous political appointments for various policy posts since
2004. It is thus fair to assume that Dr. Droegemeier has a fair bit of
experience and expertise with regard to the long-standing policies of
the US government. Moreover, previous director Holdren and several other
scientists have spoken out in favor of Dr. Droegemeier's appointment.
Attributing any false statement to incompetence would thus seem
unlikely, even if he was appointed by Trump.

It is thus straightforward to conclude that the above statement was a
lie with the purpose of scoring political points, as his statements are
very easy to verify. For instance, one can have a look at job
advertisements of a federal agency, such as the NIH, top see if they
contain any language that implies that the government may "tell
researchers where they have to publish their papers". Such statements
are, of course, easy enough to find. Here are two examples:

In [this ad for a postdoctoral
position](https://jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/497983/postdoctoral-position-in-the-translational-allergic-immunopathology-unit-niaid-nih/)
in the NIAID/NIH Translational Allergic Immunopathy Unit it lists under
expected qualifications: "a track record of publication in peer-reviewed
journals". Clearly, you are not welcome at the NIH ("this government")
if you haven't published in these particular venues.

[This ad for a postdoctoral
position](https://jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/498501/post-doctoral-research-fellow-/)
at the NCI/NIH cancer center goes even further. It makes the explicit
expectation that the candidate, once hired, continues to publish in such
journals, as the candidate "is anticipated to complete this study with
one or more high-impact publications in peer review journals."

Clearly, one of the things this US government is doing is precisely
telling researchers in no uncertain terms where they have to publish
their papers if they want to be/stay hired by this government -- in a
clear contradiction to what Dr. Droegemeier has stated in the interview.
Surely a man with such ample experience in science policy is aware of
the policies of the US's largest scientific agency?  


With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired Kelvin Droegemeier as director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February 2019.

New OSTP director caught lying in interview

I usually don't write about politics, but there has been
[one](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n457.html) or the
[other](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n383.html) exception to
this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I've been
missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in
recent times, perhaps one of the few readers of this obscure blog has
found it somewhere and can point me in this direction? I'm looking for
something like this:

"Sadly, it is very difficult to completely prevent casualties such as
those in the recent terror attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels or
elsewhere, without violating basic human rights and abandoning hard-won
liberties. Our ancestors have given their lives for these rights and
liberties and we, as a society, are equally willing to pay that price.
However, the victims of these horrific attacks have never been asked to
give their lives. They were forced to become martyrs for our human
rights and our civil liberties. It is infuriating and frustrating that
there seems to be only little we can do to prevent such deaths. However,
there are \~1.2M [preventable
deaths](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Amenable_and_preventable_deaths_statistics)
in Europe alone every year. We propose to do something about these lives
instead. These fatalities are due to causes such as lung cancer,
accidental injuries, alcohol related diseases, suicides and
self-inflicted injuries. With even in the 1970s and 1980s
terrorist-related fatalities
[never](https://www.statista.com/chart/4093/people-killed-by-terrorist-attacks-in-western-europe-since-1970/)
exceeding 500 per year, we will honor the lives of the victims of
terrorism by initiating a program that will save at least 100 lives for
every one that is being taken in a terrorist attack.

To reach this ambitious goal, we will start with increasing our efforts
to prevent alcohol and tobacco-related deaths through effective
public-health intervention programs as well as basic and applied
biomedical research into the prevention, causes and treatment of these
diseases and disorders. With about 30.000 annual fatalities in
traffic-related accidents, we will also introduce European-wide speed
limits, strong enforcement via speed-traps and an increased police force
which collaborates across Europe. Drivers convicted of violating speed
limits or DUI will have their driver's licenses withdrawn for extended
periods of time. We will increase our investments in the development of
driverless vehicles. Should these activities fail to reach these goals,
we will start targeting more areas. The individual projects will be
named after the victims of terrorism, as a reminder of their forced
contribution to the improvement of our open society. This program will
be implemented on top of the intensified, heroic efforts of our law
enforcement and intelligence agencies working hard to prevent such
attacks within the bounds of our open society. We will strive to reach
these goals in addition to our enduring political and diplomatic
initiatives to mitigate the religious, socio-economic and political
circumstances which can be used to recruit and motivate terrorists.

This death prevention program will not only protect our basic human
rights and civil liberties, it will also benefit the economy in general
and increase employment in particular. Through the additional investment
in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, our public health systems will
benefit long after any terrorist groups have ceased to exist. Our extra
investment in basic and applied research will yield discoveries that
will benefit all of humanity long after the last terrorist has
sacrificed his life in vain. With our new program, every single
terrorist attack will save the lives of countless more citizens than it
has cost, turning terrorism into a net life-saving activity."

If you have found an advocate for such a program, or one like it, please
let me know where to find them, I'd like to support them.


I usually don’t write about politics, but there has been one or the other exception to this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I’ve been missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in recent times, perhaps one of the few readers of this obscure blog has found it somewhere and can point me in this direction?

Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?

What do these two memes have in common?

[![falsememes](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-1024x354.png){.aligncenter
.size-large .wp-image-1106 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="520"
height="180"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-1024x354.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-300x104.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-768x265.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes-50x17.png 50w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes.png 1558w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/falsememes.png){rel="attachment wp-att-1106"}While
they may have more than one thing in common, the point important for now
is that despite both having an air of plausibility or 'truthiness'
around them, they're both false: neither has Donald Trump [ever
said](https://withoutbullshit.com/blog/donald-trump-memes-and-the-dangers-of-post-factual-politics)
these words to *People* magazine, nor do gay canvassers [have such an
effect](https://retractionwatch.com/2015/05/28/science-retracts-troubled-gay-canvassing-study-against-lacours-objections/)
on people's attitudes (even though the quoted statement about this
research was indeed published in *Science* magazine).

The issue of false facts has become so rampant in current politics, that
some have
[dubbed](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/welcome-to-the-postfactua_b_42527.html)
our common era "post-factual". While on the surface, "post-factual
science" appears to be an oxymoron, recent evidence raises the
tantalizing possibility that at least the literature of the
life-sciences, broadly speaking, may be on track to leaving the
reality-based community (although more research is required):

::: {#attachment_1107 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 530px"}
[![Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
and
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-1024x515.png){.wp-image-1107
.size-large loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1107" width="520" height="262"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-1024x515.png 1024w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-300x151.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-768x386.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility-50x25.png 50w"
sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/irreproducibility.png){rel="attachment wp-att-1107"}

Irreproducibility loosely defined as in "not replicated", or "difficult
to replicate with imprecise methods". Note that not all of these are
replication studies and not all of the replication studies are properly
published themselves, with data available etc. To my knowledge, only the
Open Science study is reliable in that respect. Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
:::

Obviously, this data can only hold for experimental sciences and even
there I would expect huge differences between the different sub-fields.
Nevertheless, the frequency of retractions in biomedicine is rising
exponentially, the 'majority of research findings' was
[estimated](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)
and more recently supported (at least tentatively for the findings
analyzed/replicated in the above six studies) to be false and the public
trust in science is
[eroding](https://chronicle.com/article/The-Water-Next-Time-Professor/235136).
Maybe it is not too early to start asking the question: if we can't even
trust the scientific literature, what information is trustworthy? Or,
put differently: if traditional (some would say legacy) strategies for
assigning credibility are failing us, are there more modern strategies
which can replace or at least support them?

Personally, I think this is one of the most urgent and important
challenges of the post-internet globalized society. It may well be that
science, which brought us the internet in the first place, may also be
the right place to start looking for a solution.

Truth has never been an easy concept. Some may even argue that a large
portion of humanity is probably quite happy with it being rather
malleable and pliable. It wasn't really until the 20th century that
[epistemologists](http://brembs.net/metabiology/) have explicitly
formulated a convention of what constitutes a scientific fact and how
they can be used to derive and test scientific statements. Obviously, in
life outside of science we are still far from an explicit convention,
which complicates matters even further.

Be that as it may, neither within nor outside of science can we expect
every individual to always fact-check, question and investigate every
single statement or bit of information ever encountered, no matter how
much that may be desired. There will always, inevitably have to be
shortcuts and we have been taking them, legitimately, I would argue,
since the beginning of humanity.

Initially, these shortcuts involved authority. With enlightenment and
the shedding of both religious, societal and political shackles, a
(competing?) more democratic and informal shortcut was conceived
(without ever completely replacing authority): popularity. If a
sufficiently large number of information outlets confirmed a statement,
it was considered sufficient for believing it. Both shortcuts are still
being used today both inside and outside of science, for very legitimate
reasons. However, in part because the choice of authority is often
arbitrary and may even be subject to partisan dispute, there are few, if
any, universal authorities left. Even in science, the outlets with the
most authority have been shown to publish the [least
reliable](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full)
science. This erosion of the 'authority' shortcut accelerated with the
dawn of the internet age: never before was it so easy to get so many
people to repeat so many falsehoods with such conviction.

The 'wisdom of the crowd' seems to suggest that a  sufficiently large
crowd can be at least as accurate as a small number of expert
authorities, if not more so. Social media have the uncanny ability of
always aggregating what subjectively feels like a "sufficiently large
crowd" to solidly refute any and all authority, whether that would be on
the moon landings, the 9/11 attacks, vaccination effectiveness/risk,
climate change, crime/gun control, or spherical earth. Obviously, this
not only constitutes a fatal misunderstanding of how the crowd becomes
wise, it also contributes to an unjustified, exaggerated distrust in
entities which do have significant expertise and hence credibility.

There are several reasons as to why social media, as currently
implemented are notoriously incapable of getting anywhere near an ideal
'wisdom of the crowd' effect. For one, social feedback loops tend to
aggregate people who think alike, i.e., reduce heterogeneity, when
[diversity](https://books.google.de/books?id=afqfFW8WV9cC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=micro-expertise&source=bl&ots=p-CtYBlgFM&sig=3BbQj7-n1ZICJ1qbPXONXvKsubk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=micro-expertise&f=false)
is one of the most decisive factors in achieving crowd wisdom. Second,
with our stone-age concept of a crowd, we may intellectually understand,
but fail to intuitively grasp that any group of less than a few tens of
millions is more of an intimate gathering rather than a crowd, on
internet scales. With today's social media implementation, it is
comparatively easy to quickly gather a few million people who all share
some fringe belief.

For instance, if we round the incidence of schizophrenia to about 1% of
the population and assume, for simplicity's sake, that all of them
harbor either auditory hallucinations or some other forms of delusions.
Hence, if 1% of all [internet
users](https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-internet-users-worldwide/)
were delusional in some way or form and only half of them aggregated in
an online patient forum, we'd be talking about more than 15 million
individuals. I'm pretty sure that such a patient site would deliver some
quite astounding news feed with an amazing commentariat. And this is
just one of a growing list of psychiatric disorders. How many nominally
healthy users would feel compelled to believe the news from this site,
re-share items and comment approvingly? Most far-out-there communities
have orders of magnitudes less users but disproportionately large
visibility. Indeed, some of those communities may appear just like a
subforum of such a patient site, but without a single user actually
being diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder whatsoever.

So if we want to take advantage of the
[micro-expertise](https://books.google.de/books?id=afqfFW8WV9cC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=micro-expertise&source=bl&ots=p-CtYBlgFM&sig=3BbQj7-n1ZICJ1qbPXONXvKsubk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=micro-expertise&f=false)
of the individuals in a crowd, that crowd needs to be not only
'sufficiently' large for the task at hand, it more importantly needs to
be sufficiently diverse, or size quickly becomes almost completely
irrelevant. From numerous examples in science and elsewhere, it seems
straightforward to argue that we need to harness the individual
micro-expertise that *anyone* can have, without making the mistake to
attribute this expertise to *everyone*. Authority alone cannot serve as
a reliable shortcut for credibility, but neither can popularity alone.
Here is an idea of how one might combine them.

I may be wrong, but at least for now I would argue that we probably
cannot start from scratch, assigning every institution, organization and
individual the same kind of credibility. We cannot and should not undo
history and track records based in evidence: there are information
sources that have a higher credibility than others.

Further, we probably need a score or at least ranks that get computed
iteratively and recursively. For any individual or piece of information
to gather points or climb ranks, there need to be arbiters that already
have some credibility -- another reason why we likely won't be able to
start with a level playing field. What is less clear is how such a
scoring/ranking system ought to be designed: I somehow have the
impression that it ought to be difficult to earn credibility, shouldn't
it? Of course, it's usually always "innocent until proven guilty", but
is this a practical approach when doling out credibility? Should we all
start with a credibility of 100 and then lose it? Or should we start
with 0 and then gain? Does such a score have to go negative?

So far, these ideas have been very vague and general. Here are my first
thoughts on how one may go about implementing such a system in science.
A prerequisite for such a system is, of course, a
[modern](https://csarven.ca/enabling-accessible-knowledge)
[scholarly](https://billmills.github.io/blog/full-stack/)
[information](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
[infrastructure](https://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/).
This won't work with the 350 year-old technology we call 'journals'.

Because we need diversity and inclusiveness, one would never prevent
anybody from posting whatever they have discovered. However, if someone
described a discovery from a known research institution, that discovery
would receive more credibility than if it were posted by a layman
without a track record (even though both scores would still be
relatively low at the point of publication). Similarly, if the author
list contained professors, the article would receive more credibility
than if there were only graduate student authors. Yet more credibility
would be assigned if the data and code relevant for the discovery were
openly available as well. Once this initial stage had been completed,
the document and its affiliated authors and institutions can earn even
more credibility, for instance if the code gets verified, or the data
checked for completeness and documentation. Those doing the verification
and reviewing also need to be diverse, so also here there should not be
a principle limit. However, the weight given to each verification (or
lack thereof) will be different according to the scores of the person
doing the verification.  More credit for reproducible data analysis
(e.g. via [docker](https://www.docker.com/) et al.) and if the narrative
accompanying the data/code is supported by them. This whole process
would be similar to current peer-review, albeit more fine-grained,
likely by more people (each contributing a smaller fraction of the
reviewing work) and not necessarily on each and every article.

This process continues to accrue (or lose) credibility inasmuch as the
article is receiving attention with consequences, e.g., how many views
for each citation (in accordance with a citation typology, e.g.
[CiTO](https://purl.org/spar/cito/)), how many views for each comment,
endorsement or recommendation, etc. This is one possible way of
normalizing for field size, another could be by analyzing citation
networks (as in, e.g.
[RCR](https://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/22/029629)). Clearly,
most credibility ought to be associated with the experiments in each
article being actually reproduced by independent laboratories (i.e., a
special kind of citation).

In this iterative process, each participant receives credit in various
ways for their various activities. Credibility would be just one of
several factors being constantly monitored. Points can be awarded both
for receiving (and passing!) scrutiny from others as well as
scrutinizing other people's work. The resulting system is thought to
allow everyone to check the track record of everyone else for some data
on how reliable the work of this person (or institution, or community)
has been so far, along with more details on how the track record was
generated.

Obviously, there are plenty of feedback loops involved in this system,
so care has to be taken to make these loops balance each other. The
feedback loops found in many biological processes would serve as
excellent examples of how to accomplish this. Complex systems like this
are also known to be notoriously difficult to game.

Those are still very rough ideas, without a clear picture of the most
suitable or effective implementation, yet, or whether the desired
outcomes can actually be achieved in this way. I also have no good idea
how one would take such a system to leverage it outside of science. I
would like to hope, however, that by starting on the easier case of
science, we may be able to approach a related system for the society at
large.


Earning credibility in post-factual science?

[*This is a post loosely based on an
[article](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/verbesserung-der-arbeitsbedingungen-an-unis-13354907.html)
appearing today in the German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319). Please do
let us know if you find a mistake.*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[**UPDATE**]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}*[, 09/01/2015: A commenter made
me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before. In our
analysis, we evaluated all non-scientific professional staff, e.g., also
technical support or library staff. As I'm actually quite fond of the
libraries and the technical support we have, I looked at the trends for
the 'pure' permanent administration staff and found and increase of 17%
from 2005 to 2012, while permanent scientist positions increased only by
0.04%. Taking only these two groups of employees, the ratio between
scientists and administrators shrinks to 0.57 in 2005 and 0.64 in 2012,
i.e., the average administrator has to support less than two permanently
employed scientists. In my opinion, this would have been the better data
to use, but my co-author is not quite as convinced. Either way, even
focusing on 'pure' admin staff conveys essentially the same message as
the full overall data, albeit perhaps less dramatically. This is
precisely why I am an open science advocate: making your data open
allows you to discover more and improve your
science!]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}  
*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[**UPDATE***, 16/03/2015: I was just made aware of very similar numbers
from the USA, published in this [article by Jon
Marcus](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html).*]{style="font-size: 10pt;"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Noam Chomsky, writing about the [Death of American
Universities](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/),
recently reminded us that reforming universities using a corporate
business model leads to several easy to understand consequences. The
increase of the precariat of faculty without benefits or tenure, a
growing layer of administration and bureaucracy, or the increase in
student debt. In part, this well-known corporate strategy serves to
increase labor servility. The student debt problem is particularly
obvious in countries with tuition fees, especially in the US where [a
convincing argument has been made](https://www.takepart.com/ivorytower)
that the tuition system is nearing its breaking point. The decrease in
tenured positions is also quite well documented (see e.g., an [old
post](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html)). So far, and
perhaps as may have been expected, Chomsky was dead on with his
assessment. But how about the administrations?

To my knowledge, nobody has so far checked if there really is any growth
in university administration and bureaucracy, apart from everybody
complaining about it (but see update above with link to similar numbers
from the US). So [Axel
Brennicke](https://sites.google.com/site/axelbrennicke/) and I decided
to have a look at the numbers. In Germany, employment statistics can be
obtained from the federal statistics registry,
[Destatis](https://destatis.de). We sampled data from 2005 (the year
before the [Excellence
Initiative](https://www.excellence-initiative.com/) and the [Higher
Education
Pact](https://www.research-in-germany.de/en/research-landscape/r-and-d-policy-framework/higher-education-pact.html))
and the latest year we were able to obtain, 2012.

The aim of the Excellence Initiative and the Higher Education pact was
to improve the funding situation for universities to increase scientific
competitiveness and to allow them to cope with the rising student
numbers. Student numbers increased from 2005-2012 by 25% to 2.5 million.
The number of full-time university employees in research and teaching
also increased, but only by 18% to just over 142,000, i.e., not keeping
up with student numbers. Looking at the type of contracts, we can
confirm the US trend of an increasing precariat also here in Germany: in
2005, 50% of all full-time employees were on short-term contracts. This
fraction increased by about one percentage point per year to now more
than 58%.

University leadership and politicians often argue that such short-term
employment benefits research as scientists constantly need to learn new
skills in different places and the short-term contracts keep the
work-force up-to-date and flexible. However, this argument also holds
for administrations: fluctuating student numbers, a constantly changing
funding landscape and the constant turnover of university employees
ought to mandate a flexible and slim administration as well.

However, the numbers speak a different language. Every full-time
university scientist is administrated by 1,28 employees in
administration. Of these 182,255 administrative and professional
employees, only 25% are on fixed-term contracts. The remaining 75% are
virtually tenured: it is almost impossible to make them redundant,
according to German laws and regulations for public employees.

Perhaps the two initiatives have improved on this situation? Maybe in
2005, the situation was even worse? Alas, the fraction of 'tenured'
administrative personnel and professional staff was only 70% in 2005. In
fact, for every permanent position that was created in research and
teaching between 2005-2012, 3.7 such positions were newly created in the
university administrations. This means that the average German scientist
now supervises 7 more students than in 2005, while the burden on
administrators and professional staff has only increased by 2.7
students.

These numbers show the real winners and losers of the increased cash
flow in this past decade: the students and scientists lose out, while
university administrations benefit the most from the billions. At this
point, to support the work of 60,438 permanently employed scientists in
German universities, it is apparently required to permanently employ
135,897 administrative and professional employees.

In fact, for every permanent position that was created in this time, ten
fixed-term positions were created, exacerbating the already abysmal job
prospects of German early-career scientists. This parallels the
development in many other research nations such as the US or the UK. The
situation is most dramatic for early-career scientists. The tip of this
huge iceberg are increasing number of science scandals, such as the
recent case of the young Haruko Obukata whose mentor committed suicide
after the manipulations of his student became known, or Felisa
Wolfe-Simon, who called her arsenic-less strain of bacteria "GFAJ1":
give Felisa a job.

As I [remarked](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n683.html) long
ago, the trend to corporatize higher education parallels the rise in
retractions. This rise in retractions is so rapid, that by about 2045
every published article will be accompanied by the retraction of another
article, if the current trend continues. Back in 2010, Amy Bishop killed
three of her colleagues at University of Alabama in a shooting spree
after she was denied tenure because her publication rate was deemed
insufficient. Scientists on non-permanent positions today need to
publish many articles in journals ranking high in a hierarchy that is
[devoid of any empirical
justification](https://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/fullhttps://).
On top of that, they need to devise and find funding for especially
expensive experiments, as the higher the funding, the higher the
so-called 'overhead' that the universities receive. Last year, professor
Stefan Grimm committed suicide after his employer, Imperial College
London [told
him](https://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/)
he had 12 months to pull in 200,000 Pounds in research funding or be
fired.

Today's top scientists thus have been selected by their marketing
competence to sell their work to hi-ranking journals and by their
ability to come up with expensive experiments. If their research is
actually reliable and sound, it is pure coincidence. There exist no
incentives today for just doing reproducible science.

The trends are clear on all fronts: business as usual has become
untenable. There needs to be reform and it has to be international and
far-reaching. Tinkering a little here and there is not going to cut it.
On the up side, a lot can be established by universities themselves,
without outside assistance: administration funds can be siphoned into
research/teaching positions, and the billions now tied up in
subscriptions can be used to develop a digital infrastructure which
comprises a reputation system that rewards scientists for doing reliable
science, once all subscriptions have been canceled. This is technically
and financially feasible and within a sufficiently short time-frame. But
action has to be taken now and it has to be decisive. The downside? It
has to be [collective
action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action).

P.S.: We have made the raw data on which we have written our article
[available](https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1285319) for everyone
to check. Mistakes happen and we would not want to end up like
[Reinhardt and
Rogoff](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best-evidence-for-austerity-based-on-an-excel-spreadsheet-error/).

P.P.S.: Two related articles, one in
[English](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) and one in [German
(PDF)](https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Wolf_Professorendaemmerung.pdf).


This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE


 , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Black Lives Matter

New OSTP director caught lying in interview

Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

Booming university administrations