The bullshitification of science and big tech

How ideology and dumbassery have co-opted science and technology (and the media too).

Exhibit “A” in why Big Tech is going to seed: Google executives deconstruct free speech and how it hurts their feelings. This is OK if you run a Taco truck, but not so much if you run the world’s most used search engine and its AI.

A few mornings ago, I came across an article by Ross Pomeroy in Real Clear Science: X Users Didn’t Like a Paper’s Tone and Findings, So They Got It Rejected. In a sign of the times, it seems that, at least as far as the editors of the journal Frontiers in Psychology are concerned, mobs on X are now a persuasive component of the scientific peer review process. I cannot recommend Mr. Pomeroy’s piece highly enough. It’s a stunning indictment of the current trajectory of science.

Science is a topic near and dear to my heart. As a retired physicist, watching public trust in science erode during the 21st century, almost entirely due to self-inflicted wounds, has been rough. It’s like watching religious acolytes burn a book that you spent your entire life pouring your heart, soul, and intellectual output into as an apostasy.

And as bad as this is for me and everyone else who’s taken up for science through the years, it’s much worse for everyone else who has no idea how to discern between scientific wheat and chaff. You think that our response to COVID was bad; there are, I assure you, potentially far more unfortunate things lurking in the shadows. We were relatively lucky that COVID didn’t turn out worse than it did.

The next time, I’m not so sure that we are as lucky. I’m concerned for our future, since our greatest tools for bailing humanity out of the jams that we keep getting ourselves into—science, technology, and independent media—are going down the tubes.

Let’s start with science. What attracted me to science very early on was that it was all about having the goods. If you could demonstrate that your ideas were correct based on the evidence you’d gathered through research and/or experimentation, almost no one cared where you came from, who your mama and daddy were, how much money you had, where you went to church, where you went to school, who you voted for, what side of the train tracks you lived on, or anything else. They cared about what your data said. That’s what your peers responded to.

To wit: over a century ago, at a time when women (among others) faced enormous obstacles in professional fields, Marie Curie won not one but two Nobel Prizes for her pioneering work in radioactivity. Curie overcame tremendous obstacles in her life and career to become one of the most lauded scientists of all time. Her work was brilliant, and she responded to critics (of which there were many), not with whining and carping but with better data than theirs. Curie broke off a foot in more than one fanny.

Was any of this easy? Certainly not. But because she was a scientist, as opposed to a member of almost any other profession at the time, it was possible. Her work spoke for itself. The rest, as they say, is history.

Marie Curie is but one among many in science who found prominence because of persistence, courage, and the ability to face critics with the goods rather than because of identity or membership in a clique. I have a feeling that if Curie were to awaken today and learn about the rejection of a perfectly reasonable scientific paper by Frontiers in Psychology because an X mob didn’t like it’s tone or findings, her first action after rising from the dead might be to puke.

Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire revealed in a recent thread on X the degree to which things other than merit have usurped merit in medical science. Specifically, the role of DEI in promoting identity over competence in some of our nation’s most prestigious medical schools, including Wake Forest, Duke, and UPenn.

And at the American College of Surgeons, where the powers that be apparently think that having a surgeon who looks like a patient is more important than having a surgeon who knows how to operate on the patient.

We’re not talking here about academics way out where the buses don’t run who want to decolonize light; we’re talking about front-line medical schools and the ACS. What’s next? Leeches? This stuff isn’t going away either. Despite the fact that state after state is banning DEI as racist, divisive, and a counterproductive assault on merit, it keeps popping up under new names, such as neurodiversity.

It is now beyond evident that the entire world was misled by scientists, among others, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID pandemic that killed millions and begat widespread economic and social catastrophe. This was done for reasons other than science.

Several U.S. intelligence agencies (most notably the FBI) have concluded that the most likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not from natural zoonotic spillover, a hypothesis that we were force-fed by government scientists and the leftist media, but from a lab leak at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, the city where COVID undeniably originated. Some of the American scientists who were in charge of directing our response to the pandemic may have initiated this research.

The reason for this deception? Aside from the now obvious conflict of interest among a coterie of government-affiliated scientists and bureaucrats, some were loathe, for political reasons, to cast aspersions on their comrades in China. Some considered the truth to be less important than preventing racial animus.

None of this is a good look for science. It’s hard for me to dispute with any excess of vigor the notion that many scientists are as full of crap as just about everyone else anymore. In this case, the naysayers have the goods.

For me, this is a dagger in the heart. I spent a career dissecting bad science and pseudoscience to expose it’s rot to the world. When people with pedigrees in physics got behind 9/11 conspiracy theories, cold fusion, isomer weapons, devices that violate thermodynamics, and other silliness, I did my job by calling it out. Alas and alack, that’s not the way many of the current generation in science see things. As they see it, their job is to go along to get along. Rocking the boat is bad for business.

I remember one moment in particular, when I had the opportunity to confront the principal scientific architect of the 9/11 Truthers, Steven Jones, right after he’d spent months serving up nonsense to national TV audiences. Ours was the first group of scientific peers that he spoke in front of.

The lecture hall where the event was held had 350 seats, all occupied, with dozens standing in the back. Jones had his entire research team, which consisted of his large family, assembled in the front of the room, and we had an audience of scientists and engineers. It was the 21st-century physics version of the shootout at the OK Corral.

As you might expect, this did not go well for Jones. It’s one thing to bamboozle TV anchors who lack the requisite knowledge of physics and engineering to refute nonsensical assertions concerning the destruction of the WTC towers on 9/11; it’s quite another to convince an audience of physicists and engineers that burning jet fuel could not have brought down steel towers because it burns a temperature less than that required to melt structural steel (ignoring momentum transfer, steel deforms well before it melts) or that titanium (the whitening agent in white paint) collected from dust at the site was indicative of the use of explosives.

It was the beginning of Jones eventual downfall. A few weeks later, even BYU decided to cut ties with him. When your ability to suspend disbelief is too much for even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the end is near.

But here’s the thing: my colleagues and I were called on the carpet for our aggressive questioning of Jones. Bad publicity, according to the then president of our university. “You shouldn’t invite people just to criticize their work and make them look bad. The community is upset.” This from a university president with a pedigree in medical science.

Thinking back on that moment, I should have seen the writing on the wall. Agitprop, as peer review was inevitable.

In the past few months, Racket News and Public, among others, have done exhaustive reporting on the burgeoning role of big tech in assisting governments around the world in censoring and delegitimizing accurate information that ran afoul of some preferred, generally leftist, official narrative. This is troubling, especially in the United States, where our First Amendment specifically prohibits government suppression of speech, accurate or not. The blatant political bias of these organizations all but assures that this censorship goes mostly one way.

To be clear, private companies, like Google, Meta, X, etc., may do what they want (within the boundaries of contractual law) with speech. My response, as a consumer, is simply to do business elsewhere if I disagree with them. But it’s quite another thing when a private business does the government’s bidding, especially in the U.S., even under the threat of arm-twisting or other coercion.

Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky studying computer science, you would have found no one in our department—faculty, staff, or students—who would have agreed to go along with a scheme to censor our users at the suggestion of the government. We may have been young and foolish in many ways, but selling out our users wasn’t on our radar. We were too close in history to Nazi Germany, the Cold War, and Watergate. We didn’t trust any government to make better decisions than we did about what to code and who to do it for.

Later, when I became involved in physics, blowing up conspiracy theories and media-sponsored nonsense, like the post-China Syndrome anti-nuclear hysteria, was considered an obligation. It didn’t matter whether you made friends or not; it was your job.

And for most of my five decades as a writer, the last people I would have expected to advocate for censorship would be reporters. Yet we have Adam Rubenstein’s recent tale of woe at the New York Times, which is apparently now the world’s largest daycare for people who’d like to one day grow up to be actual reporters.

But here we are. And I’m less than hopeful for the future.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.