Too often, as the WSJ’s puffery shows, we take scientists to be super-human, rationalists above all else, never prone to the human frailties of ego, jealousy, etc. I would argue that it’s because scientists have become our “secular priesthood“, as Chomsky observed. Dethroning God was all well and good, if one sought the facts, but mankind’s hubris arguably increased. Yet there is something in the human character which compels worship or at least “some inherent, naïve trust about some class of human beings” such as scientists, certain politicians, et al., as Russ Roberts noted in one of the EconTalk podcasts. Science does not approach, in one sense, papal infallibility, but might it not approximate it in some regard, e.g., socially?
And what of peer pressure to compel understanding? That is perhaps even more interesting, as seen in the Asch experiment below. Is it a researcher’s ultimate dream to debunk the prevailing theories, or to support them, and so garner more funding to continue his/her vocation? Is it only cynical to presume the latter? How much pressure is there? I think we are well-advised not to presume too much, of course, and then proceed without evidence, but whether the nose knows or gets a false sense of fishy, a kind of ‘memetic illness‘, I must defer to better writers such as Shalizi. All of my whinging is but to question… I’ll tell jokes later. In fact, a story on that is in the works.
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