Death by a Thousand Cuts

Bad science links diverse crises that divide and conquer activists

It’s pretty hard not to notice the world is on fire. We were already set to likely overshoot 1.5 degrees C of warming before the outcome of another water-treading Cop UN climate summit last Sunday. No surprise there: over three decades of knowing what’s up and trying to change it, we haven’t bent the global carbon emissions curve.

Increasingly, medical professionals and scientists are joining the fight. Climate scientist-activists argue that science isn’t value-neutral, scientists have a moral obligation to also be activists when the public interest is at stake, and we have to say how power shapes the stories that get told in the name of science, which in turn help shape the world.

This resonates with science reform efforts. Hordes of statistical methodologists recently encouraged scientists to acknowledge uncertainty in statistical analyses by cutting out statistical significance test misuse. Statistician Sander Greenland points out that methods mistakes like this often help spin stories, with scientists tending to put out the preferred causal narratives of powerful social networks under the umbrella of objectivity while doing a lot of hidden interpretative work under the guise of apparently neutral statistics.

My work seems to increasingly be “When Greenland Met Chomsky.” Extending to science the idea that there’s a propaganda model of mass communication whereby state-corporate media control functions to manufacture consent to the political order by controlling the information environment. Chomsky and Herman say media does social control; Greenland says science does, too.

Back in the context of the world burning right now, climate activists say their issue supercedes all others, because it’s existential at such a large scale. While true, we’re arguably losing that war because too many people are busy managing too many other crises contributed to by the same underlying problems. One of those problems, which I want to suggest is equally pressing because of its causal contribution to how badly we’re failing to tackle the climate crisis, is the collective action problem of propaganda science. The what? 

I know, I know: That’s too “Master of All Masters.” As in: “Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum.” The punchline from the English fairy tale where a servant learns her new master’s special terms for everything, and manages to use them perfectly instead of just saying, as quickly as possible — dude, your house is about to be on fire. Except I’d like to tell as many people as possible about this stuff, so I’m effectively saying the punchline not even to the master, but to the tenants who didn’t get the memo. These tenants have a problem of many fires in different corners concerning different subgroups of tenants. And they feel, understandably, that they can only care about their fire.

The concept of methods I’m exploring here, “research methods for revolution,” is about telling everyone in that house about reinvisioning better science as a radical political necessity. A lot of science communication accidentally does worshipful PR for what people say their work says, which is often wrong. The alternative is to also do methodological criticism (nitty-gritty technical stuff that I love to talk about more than anyone likes to hear it), critical rethinking of the big picture (in interdisciplinary and people-focused terms), and anti-corruption work (paging the science police). While also managing to write well about complex stuff for a popular audience. 

On some level, this project is a big-picture rethink of what scientist-activists like me got wrong ten years ago. In different ways, on different levels, we put our hearts and our lives on the line to tell the truth in an effort to change the world for the better. We got our asses handed to us, and the problems didn’t get solved. Why? 

Because it wasn’t an information problem. We naively thought the truth would set us free. And on some level, it’s commendable to try that even knowing that it will fail, or be used instrumentally for other interests’ often nefarious purposes (in harsher terms), or be ever aspirational but serve to sometimes hold some of the powerful to the accountability of their stated principles (in gentler ones). 

But in terms of actually getting stuff done, the truth about truth-telling was more complex than information equalling change. As any seasoned cog will attest, truth is more chameleon or Cheshire Cat than panda or zebra. Its color changes depending on where it sits, its smile comes and goes, and it’s not all in black and white. 

Is it possible that the anti-authoritarians who cruised and got bruised in the last decade were paradoxically too Manichean in our thinking? We thought “it” was an information problem, from evidence of war crimes and mass surveillance, to corruption in financial systems and medical hierarchies, and a thousand other manifestations of wrong that pepper primary records in policing, teaching, healthcare, and beyond. It’s one of the classic whistleblower mistakes, along with thinking there are enough of us to burn the individual one has a right to burn in service of a cause, and not bargaining on just how effective gatekeeping can be even once the truth is out of the gate. 

The information environment matters more than what’s in it. How critically people are able to evaluate evidence matters more than whether or not one particular piece is out there, or not. It’s education that indoctrinates, and education that at least frees us to see the limits of our own freedom. 

Now what? How do we help a new batch of less seasoned scientists-activists stop making the same mistake on a tighter clock? There’s little reason to believe that shouting climate science from the rooftops is going to work any better than releasing the documents did, and that matters. 

So what would it mean to go big or go home in speaking truth to power, in such a way that the public can encode that information more meaningfully to bring collective action in line with the public interest? In other words: Can science education save the world, or are we totally hosed?