Science as the ultimate accountability process

Before getting into Science as the ultimate accountability process, let me allow that I am biased in favor of this scientific era!  Especially after last weekend when Caltech - my alma mater - honored me - along with three far-more-deserving others - as Distinguished Alumnus.  Seems worth noting. Especially since it is one honor I truly never expected!

You  readers of Contrary Brin might be surprised that, with the crucial US election looming, I'm gonna step back from cliff-edge politics, to offer some Big Picture Perspective about how science works... and civilization, in general. 

But I think maybe perspective is kinda what we need, right now.

== How did we achieve the flawed miracle that we now have... and take too much for granted? ==

All the way back to our earliest records, civilization has faced a paramount problem. How can we maintain and improve a decent society amid our deeply human propensity for lies and delusion? 

As recommended by Pericles around 300 BCE… then later by Adam Smith and the founders of our era… humanity has only ever found one difficult but essential trick that actually works at freeing leaders and citizens to craft policy relatively - or partially - free from deception and falsehoods. 

That trick is NOT preaching or ‘don’t lie’ commandments. Sure, for 6000 years, top elites finger-wagged and passed laws against such stuff... only to become top liars and self-deceivers! Bringing calamities down upon the nations and peoples that they led.

Laws can help. But the truly ’essential trick’ that we’ve gradually become somewhat good-at is Reciprocal Accountability … freeing rival powers and even average citizens to keep an eye on each other laterally. Speaking up when we see what we perceive as lies or mistakes.

== How we've done this... a method under threat! ==

Yeah, sometimes it’s the critic who is wrong, and conventional wisdom can be right!  

Indeed, one of today's mad manias is to assume that experts - who spent their lives studying a topic closely - must be clueless compared to those who are 'informed' by Facebook memes and cable news rants.

Still, Criticism Is the Only Known Antidote to Error (CITOKATE!)...

...and one result of free speech criticism is a system that’s open enough to spot most errors – even those by the mighty – and criticize them (sometimes just in time and sometimes too late) so that many (never all!) of them get corrected. 

We aren’t yet great at it! Though better than all prior generations. And at the vanguard in this process is science.

== The horrible, ingrate reflex is NOT 'questioning authority' ==

Sure, scientists are human and subject to the same temptations to self-deceive or even tell lies. We who were trained in a scientific field (or two or three) were taught to recite the sacred catechism of science: “I might be wrong!” 

That core tenet – plus piles of statistical and error-checking techniques – made modern science different – and vastly more effective (and less hated) -- than all or any previous priesthoods. Still, we remain human. And delusion in science can have weighty consequences.

Which brings us to this article by Chris Said: "Scientific whistleblowers can be compensated for their service."  It begins with a paragraph that’s both true and also way exaggerates!  Still, the author poses a problem that needs an answer:

“Science has a fraud problem. Highly cited research is often based on faked data, which causes other researchers to pursue false leads. In medical research, the time wasted by followup studies can delay the discovery of effective treatments for serious diseases, potentially causing millions of lives to be lost.”

As I said: that’s an exaggeration – one that feeds into today’s Mad Right, in its all-out war vs. every fact-using profession. (Not just science, but also teaching, medicine and law and civil service... all the way to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.) 

Still, the essay is worth reading for its proposed solution. Which boils down to do more reciprocal accountability, only do it better!

The proposal would start with the fact that most scientists are competitive creatures! Among the most competitive that this planet ever produced – nothing like the lemming, paradigm-hugger stereotype spread by some on the far-left... and by almost everyone on today’s entire gone-mad right. 

Only this author proposes that we then augment that competitiveness with whistle blower rewards**, to incentivize the cross-checking process with cash prizes.

Hey, I'm all in favor! I’ve long pushed for stuff like this since my 1998 book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? 

...and more recently my proposal for a FACT Act...

...and especially lately, suggesting incentives so that Artificial Intelligences will hold each other accountable (our only conceivable path to a ’soft AI landing.’) 

So, sure… the article is worth a look - and more discussion. 

Just watch it when yammerers attack science in general with the 'lemming' slander. Demand cash wagers over that one!

== A useful tech rule-of-thumb? ==

Do you know the “hype cycle curve”? That’s an observational/pragmatic correlation tool devised by Gartner in the 90s, for how new technologies often attract heaps of zealous attention, followed by a crash of disillusionment, when even the most promising techs encounter obstacles to implementation, and many just prove wrong. 

That trough is followed, in a few cases, by a more grounded rise in solid investment, as productivity takes hold. (It happened repeatedly with railroads and electricity and later with computers and the Internet and seems to be happening with AI.) The inimitable Sabine Hossenfelder offers a podcast about this, using recent battery tech developments as examples. 

Your takeaways: yes, it seems that some battery techs may deliver major good news pretty soon. And remember this ‘hype cycle’ thing is correlative, not causative. It has almost no predictive utility in individual cases.

But the final take-away is also important. That progress is being made! Across many fronts and very rapidly. And every single thing you are being told by the remnant denialist cult about the general trend toward sustainable technologies is a damned lie.

Take this jpeg I just copied from the newsletter of Peter Diamandis, re: the rapidly maturing tech of perovskite based solar cells, which have a theoretically possible efficiency of 66%, double that of silicon. (And many of you first saw the word “perovskite” in my novel Earth, wherein I pointed out that most high-temp superconductors take that mineral form… and so does most of the Earth’s mantle. Put those two together!)

Do subscribe to Peter’s Abundance Newsletter, as an antidote to the gloom that’s spread by today’s entire gone-mad-right and by much of today’s dour, farthest-fringe-left. 

The latter are counter-productive sanctimony junkies, irritating but statistically unimportant as we make progress without much help from them.

The former are a monstrously insane, science-hating treason-cult that’s potentially lethal to our civilization and world and our children. And for those mouth-foaming neighbors of ours, the only cure will be victory – yet again, and with malice toward none – by the Union side in this latest phase of our recurring confederate fever. 

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** The 1986 Whistle Blower law, enticing tattle-tales with up to 30% cuts of any $$ recovered by the US taxpayers, has just been gutted by a Trump appointed (and ABA 'not-qualified') judge. Gee, I wonder why?