'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

Re:'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? by wutbrodo on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @12:51AM (#22052034)

You're asking for examples where science is robust and well-documented but has been _blocked_ from being published? You understand that this is effectively an unanswerable question, right? How would anyone here come to know about such findings if they existed, and further know that they well-documented _despite their not being published_?

It's fundamentally unknowable how much science is being denied the imprimatur of good science for ideological reasons while "actually" being good science. The best you can hope for is examples that meet a lower, more reasonable bar that point to problems in the culture of academia, from which you can extrapolate chilling effects.

There are examples of things like this, as in Case & Deaton's description[1] of the reaction to their study on declining mortality amongst US whites:

> Deaton: Anne presented the first paper once and was told, in no uncertain terms: How dare you work on whites. Case: I was really beaten up. Deaton: And these were really senior people. Case: Very senior people.

This example is just off the top of my head, and it's a blatant example of a study that _isn't even saying anything that taboo_, except among those whose brains have been thoroughly liquefied by politics. If examples as dramatic as this exist, at well-known, highly-regarded institutions, for a paper _published by a Nobel Laureate_, it's not unreasonable to conclude that there's some degree of unobservable cases that were actually successfully blocked, along with chilling effects changing the direction of research in the first place.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-d...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? by Retric on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @01:11AM (#22052094)

Many academics are more than happy to raise a stink about suppression of other topics outside of traditional channels. Ex: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-depart... So, it’s reasonable to expect examples of actual suppression.

If nothing else I expect someone to be making that argument on at least one paper somewhere. Though how much merit that’s worth depends on the paper.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? by wutbrodo on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @03:22AM (#22052558)

This isn't inconsistent at all with the premise we're discussing. Academics are happy to make a stink about _external_ influence on their research, influence that runs contrary to beliefs dominant in academia[1]. Bitching about the Trump administration isn't going to lose you any friends in academia, but bitching about forces internal to academia, whose sympathy much of academia lies with, is a whole different ballgame.

(Note that I'm referring to the opinions of "academia" fairly carelessly here for conciseness, when I mean things like "the dominant opinion among the individuals making up the departments that affect an academic's career")

[1] Note that I'm not making any statement about academia being left or right specifically. Ie, I think the OP comment of the thread may be right about these forces being sometimes lefty

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? by thu2111 on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @04:24AM (#22052856)

To write papers academics need to get grant funding. That's where the bottlenecks are going to primarily be.

That said I've read a whole bunch of essays by scientists whose research couldn't be published for explicitly stated ideological reasons over time, like this one:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

[ Parent | on HN ]