Yeah, we're a bit knackered, but baseball gives me hope

Science (along with much else) is suffering from a lack of trust these days and it's a self-inflicted wound. We can fix it, but it'll take some doing. Meanwhile, baseball is still cool.

Last night, I watched the Cincinnati Reds play the Los Angeles Dodgers at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati on TV. The Reds, who have the second-youngest roster in MLB, have some interesting pieces for a potentially competitive ball club down the road. Without a doubt, they at least have some exciting young prospects.

It’s great to see a small-market team like the Reds build from within their own farm system. Last night, we got a glimpse of what is perhaps to come. I’m all in.

The buzz in Cincinnati is currently all about Elly De La Cruz, and why not? The kid is going to be a star. He’s got size, incredible speed, and a cannon for an arm. He hit a home run nearly out of GABP in his first game in the majors. But he’s not the only rookie on the Reds having an impact. There are several more.

Last night belonged to one of them, a young man named Will Benson, who hit a walk-off homer, his first in MLB, to secure a comeback victory for the Reds. Benson is 24 years old and has been knocking around in the minors for quite a while. Earlier this year, during a difficult spring training, he called his parents and told them that he was thinking about calling it quits. They encouraged him to give it one more try.

Last night, against the Dodgers, it paid off when Benson tagged one in the bottom of the ninth and hit a line drive into the right field stands. When he rounded third, the entire Reds team had left their dugout and was waiting for him at home plate.

The joy in that moment was immense. I’ve watched the replay a dozen times because it makes me feel good every time I see it.

Getting to the majors is incredibly difficult. Here’s a young man who worked hard his entire life for a dream that he was about to give up on. Then this moment—pure magic. Things like this are what I love about sports and why I refuse to give up on humanity. If we can create joyful moments like this, we may not be as knackered as I sometimes think that we are.

But now on to what’s less than great. There’s a fair bit of it.

Please forgive the coarse and ribald nature of this meme, but I thought it necessary to make a point on social media, albeit by going for a cheap laugh. Bad science and pseudoscience have always been with us, but these days both have achieved a whole new level of high-profile notoriety.

I used to think that those with academic credentials touting the scientific basis for Bigfoot, 9/11 conspiracy theories, chemtrails, moon-landing hoaxes, cold fusion, UFOs, and the like were some of the loopiest people in the world. I spent my scientific career calling them out. One of the most interesting days of my life occurred just after I gave an interview to a national news outlet deriding the so-called overwhelming evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. I got scorched-earth emails at a rate of several hundred per hour for a day or so after. Fun fun.

I was very fortunate to work with colleagues who took a similarly dim view of poor science, bad science, and pseudoscience. We tag-teamed the infidels.

The first talk that physicist and 9/11 truther Steven E. Jones gave to an audience of peers after spending a year making the rounds on TV (feeding bad physics to journalists who were out of their depth discussing anything bigger than a license plate number) was at my institution, Idaho State University. It did not go well for him. And despite the fact that we were roundly criticized for unloading on an invited speaker, we did exactly what scientists and academics are supposed to do. We asked questions, found the responses wanting, and challenged many demonstrably false assertions.

Jones treatment was rough, but it was fair. You should not address a roomful of physicists with physics that’s wrong, reams of manipulated data, and methodology that’s so poor it wouldn’t cut it in a fifth grade science project. Calling that type of thing out is what you are supposed to do if you are a scientist worth your salt.

But Jones was allowed to speak. Not only that, he was encouraged to keep speaking. No one shouted him down or protested his right to present his views—even after he opened by making the case that planes crashing into the WTC towers could not have brought down the buildings alone because burning jet fuel is not hot enough to melt structural steel. It was all downhill from there. But Jones was afforded every opportunity to defend his ideas. He just couldn’t do it.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work. At least Jones showed up to face his critics.

These days, the 9/11 conspiracy, Bigfoot, cold fusion, and weather wars people of a few decades ago almost look like worthy adversaries compared to the current batch of credentialed knuckleheads, who hide from critics, pushing bad COVID-19 information, gender identity nonsense, and much of the green agenda. I’m not particularly surprised at where we are today, even if I’m very disappointed.

In my view, we are where we are right now in no small part due to the abysmal failure of the academy to function as an impartial and effective gatekeeper of good scholarship. I got to watch it all unfold up close and personal. When we called out bad science for what it was, we were generally met with incredulity at our poor manners and lack of collegiality. That’s only gotten worse with the passing of time.

I was once asked, two decades ago, to sit on a committee that was, I kid you not, charged with planning a year-long, taxpayer-funded Bigfoot exhibit for a university museum. My presence on this committee generated heartburn because I’d publicly questioned using National Science Foundation funds to augment this project. I was there for window dressing only. Rarely was I acknowledged when I had a comment or question. And when I was, I was dismissed with low-level chuckles and quietly whispered snide remarks.

The people on this committee all had advanced degrees in their fields, and a few were even scientists. Yet they all thought that the existence of a reclusive nine-foot-tall hominid with the approximate density of iron (according to footprints) running around in the woods of the northwest, leaving no scat or sign (other than blurry photos), dining on luminiferous ether, and evidently capable of clandestinely burying itself, was plausible.

The postmodernists loved the “ways of knowing” aspect of the planned exhibit. The social and behavioral folks liked the indigenous cultural tie-ins. The anthropologists liked the half million dollars of NSF funds. Nothing was going to stop this, especially facts. Every time I had the opportunity to point out that there was no evidence that Bigfoot was real, everyone else at the table looked at me like I’d just produced a large bowl of steaming scat for the drink tray. It was surreal in the most Kafkaesque manner imaginable.

Now allow me to draw a reasonably straight line from then to where we find ourselves now. The people on that long-ago committee and many others like it in universities everywhere went on to educate and mentor a generation of students, many of whom are now professionals in the same fields. A lot of these younger academics have been educated with a steady diet of safe spaces, low expectations, and an adherence to various ideologies rather than with a scientific interest in pursuing facts.

Right now, there is a story making the rounds on all of the major news outlets concerning an unknown whistle-blower’s allegations that the U.S. government has parts of a dozen or so UFOs of alien origin secretly stashed in a warehouse somewhere. This is, of course, prima facie absurd. I will not belabor you with the remote statistical odds of this being true. If you read this column, you probably already know anyway.

The point is that this ridiculous story is making the rounds because people who ought to know better, who are freaking supposed to know better, do not. Worse, the pundit class and their resident talking heads do not possess enough critical thinking skills to even ask the right questions about any of it. How is it possible, for instance, that a species advanced enough to solve all of the immense challenges associated with travel across the vast gulfs of space ends up in a secret hangar for decades after getting shot down by a P-40 Warhawk?

It’s no small wonder that science isn’t trusted like it used to be. I understand that the public at large doesn’t really get science anymore, something that we really need to address, but a lot of the current distrust in science is because of scientists themselves, who wander way off the ranch in pursuit of things other than where the facts lead. That’s how we get UFOs competing for our attention with heart-attack-serious actual world events.

All of this is fixable, but it’s not going to be easy. And it’s going to require that a few safe spaces get nuked.

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