Technocrats in Science Skin Suits
We're going to need the science back
Enrico Fermi wondered about our place in the Universe. The celebrated 20th century physicist was involved, among other things, in architecting the atomic bomb, so he had good reason for concern. Sitting with scientist friends at lunch one day, considering the vastness of the cosmos, he asked “where is everybody?”
Our galaxy alone has billions of stars that are similar to our sun, our sun being a fairly standard sort of a star. Many of those billions of other sun-like stars almost certainly have Earth-like planets orbiting them, planets with a good likelihood of having liquid water at their surfaces. And many of those other Earth-like planets are far older than Earth. If even a tiny fraction of those life-amenable planets evolved life earlier than we did, we should expect some of them to have long since evolved sentient life, and in turn, for some of that sentient life to have innovated interstellar travel, and in turn, for some of them to have reached out by now.
There should, that is, be many other technologically advanced civilizations out there, and yet we seem to be alone.
And so the Fermi Paradox was born. Where is everybody?
Many possibilities have been considered.
Perhaps the conditions required for the evolution of life are far more unusual than we understand. Being in the “habitable zone” around an appropriate star may well be necessary, but also insufficient. Perhaps our moon is a critical piece of the equation, and Jupiter too, a gas giant of a planet that could almost have been a second sun.
Perhaps extinction events over which a planet’s inhabitants have little control are more common than we like to imagine. Sixty-five million years ago, more or less, an asteroid that was at least six miles in diameter smacked the Yucatán peninsula. This event is now usually credited with ending the Age of Dinosaurs and ushering in the Age of Mammals.1 Giant space rocks are a credible threat. Less intuitive but also credibly threatening are coronal mass ejections, pole shifts, and fluctuations in galactic magnetic fields.
Or perhaps sentient life has indeed evolved, over and over and over again, but it keeps snuffing itself out before it manages to reach for the stars.
In that vein, some years back, I half-jokingly proposed that it was the inevitability of postmodernism that takes out civilizations, and all of the sentient beings along with it.
It was only kind of a joke.2
Postmodernism has been defined a nearly infinite number of ways3, but its starkest and most dangerous tenets include rejection of rationality, and rejection of the very idea of an objective reality. Postmodernism is destructive rather than generative, it narrows one’s field of view rather than expands it, cuts off possibilities rather than creating them. It is, I think, anti-science.
Science is absolutely necessary for a civilization to thrive.
Science can be defined as a process by which we build knowledge through observation, hypothesis and prediction. By repeatedly attempting to prove ourselves wrong—to falsify our most cherished beliefs by putting our hypotheses to rigorous tests—we hope to incrementally arrive at a more complete and accurate understanding of the universe. Science is not its results, though—a litany of facts. It is also not inherently quantitative, and certainly not inherently reductionist.
Postmodernism is adopted most enthusiastically by academics who eschew science consciously and intentionally. Yes, its tenets and confusions are creeping into science. But postmodernism isn’t accomplishing the death of science on its own. It’s getting a lot of help along the way.
The technocrats who rule our world are bludgeoning us with something they call science. It’s not science, though. The majority of modern people in the West were, through no fault of their own, poorly educated in the ways and means of science. Faced with endless terms and processes to memorize, they became convinced that they’re not “good at science.” Once so convinced, they are easily swayed by the technocrats.
Technocrats win when the people are incapable of thinking scientifically for themselves. The technocrats accomplish this by putting a kind of spell on the populace, placing them in the sway of something called The Science, which the people cannot see has nothing to do with actual science.
Long before the rise of postmodernism, we saw attacks on actual science—gatekeepers arose in the form of federal agencies doling out research dollars, editors at scientific journals restricting publications, tenure committees declining to award tenure. Gate-keeping is not the problem, though—it’s the gameable nature of the gates that’s the problem. If the gates being kept are gameable, the entire system is a farce.
Behind the façade of meritocracy is a network of connections—you favorably review my paper and help it get published, and I’ll favorably review yours. Scientism becomes a stand-in for science; measurable, titratable units a stand-in for hypothesis and prediction. “Data-driven” is proclaimed without irony to be the goal by generations of would-be scientists. These are scientists with the appropriate degrees and grants and instrumentation and publication records. These are also scientists without, apparently, any idea what it is that the scientific process is capable of.
Data do not come first in science. Observation and hypothesis come first. Absent that, data are nothing more than numbers. Numbers are easy to manipulate. When data come first, data can quickly turn into propaganda.
Many would argue the benefits of science in terms of the practicality—look at all the problems that it can solve, from curing disease to making travel safer and faster! But I wish to make a different argument entirely. Understanding how to wield the tools of science is an individual imperative for everyone, for without that capacity, you are beholden to others, and can be taken advantage of by anyone who claims the mantle of science. That mantle is yours. It is not theirs to have. But in order to claim it, and keep it as your own, you need practice discerning patterns and falsifying ideas, and you need a combination of confidence and humility. Confidence and humility are the very things with which one does science.
I now fear, and I’m not half-joking this time, that the resolution to the Fermi Paradox may lie with the power-hungry technocrats who gate-keep actual science, while wearing it like a skin suit. Perhaps they do not realize that once they’ve killed off science, they will doom us all.
Don’t tell the birds, though, as they seem to be doing just fine, and yes, they are dinosaurs. Mammals existed many tens of millions of years before the asteroid Chicxulub hit Earth, but we were small and inconspicuous, and did not appear primed to take over the planet. Patience would appear to be a virtue.
I also addressed the Fermi Paradox in my very first Natural Selections post, in July 2021 (“Fact Checkers Aren’t Scientists”). There I argued that it is the replacement of scientists with “fact-checkers” that will do us in.
I used to work at a 'non-profit research institute' on scientific research projects for EPA, DOD and DOE. Often, the overall premise of a project was just insane, or something that everyone on the project knew was not going to work. It never mattered. We were paid to do something that might look like science to someone on the outside. Our reports always confirmed that the premise on which the funding body was based was, in fact, correct. There was never a hypothesis, just the agenda of the people who paid our bills. We often referred to it as scientific welfare. I got out of that and into the world of start ups. The simple goal of making things that people will want by the application of science feels a lot more honest to me.
"Data do not come first in science. Observation and hypothesis come first. Absent that, data are nothing more than numbers. Numbers are easy to manipulate. When data come first, data can quickly turn into propaganda."
Amen. As has often been said, there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there's statistics. There's a bunch of numbers out there, measuring pretty nearly everything. You tell me the conclusion you want, and I will find you the numbers that 'prove' it.