Monday 11 March 2013

British Science goes quacky

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Imagine, if you will, a group of high-profile alternative medicine advocates calling for the government to increase expenditure on their fields by at least £2bn, year-in, year-out. Where the money for this is to come from is unsaid, although many in the community view other branches of science and research with disdain and outright contempt. The basis for this demand is that lots of people are employed in the alternative medicine industry, and economic competitors like China, India, and Germany, spend a great deal of money on homeopathy; therefore expenditure in such areas increases GDP. Imagine, when asked to provide peer-reviewed evidence for that empirical claim, the response is to provide one link – which doesn’t back their claim– and to demand that you look for their evidence that they are using to back up their claims. Richard-Hammond type acolytes soon join in, to call such polite demands for proper evidence as ‘Douchebag trolling’. What would the reactions of scientists and self-entitled ‘skeptics’ be?

Normally, the answer would be obvious. Such people clearly have contempt for the scientific method; after all, as we’re constantly told, science is all about putting ‘common sense’ claims to the test, and to publish those tests in peer-review journals. When asked to verify claims, the evidence is – or should be – there for all too see. If there’s no evidence, then there’s barely an argument to be made. Supplying ad hominem abuse instead of proper evidence is the signature strategy of the ur-quack, which skeptics would be all-over as a rash, pithily demanding ‘Evidence! Or STFU!’

In this case though, the quacks in question are scientists, and not just any scientists but the most prominent and eminent in the country. A group of them wrote a letter to the Telegraph, calling for the science budget to be substantially increased, by roughly £2bn a year. The reasoning for this is not to advance the frontiers of knowledge, or bask further in the wonder of intellectual discovery, but because of its essential contribution to GDP growth.

This is, put simply, an empirical claim: more Government expenditure on science leads to higher GDP. Given that scientists and skeptics are all about the evidence, I asked Brian Cox for the evidence to support that empirical claim. He provided a paper that was not peer-reviewed (even if written by academics), mostly comprising of cherry-picked cased studies. A long-term meta-analysis of the record of economic growth levels of comparable developed countries, cross-referenced against the level of government expenditure would have been far more credible and ‘scientific’, but that was not forthcoming. In relying so heavily on highly unrandomised cherry-picked case studies, the authors clearly had an agenda to promote science spending, but to their credit, even they conceded that the ‘science in – GDP out’ argument that the scientists used today was flawed. As the authors said:
‘Over the past 30 years, it has become clear that such a simple ‘science-push’ linear model of innovation is seriously misleading in several important respects…. [that] escalating uncertainties makes it extremely difficult to identify what fraction of a specific economic or social benefit should be attributed to a particular set of research activities.’
Call me pernickety, but I didn’t find this to be sufficiently definitive empirical proof to base spending an extra £2bn a year – and rising – every year, for ever. Cox asked for my reaction to the report, so I gave it. He didn’t respond to the criticism, only to tell me to look for the evidence that he was relying on to make the argument – assuming there is an evidence-base for the policy he advocates. No literature from peer-review journals was offered.

Michael Jennings, the European Commission spokesperson for Research, Innovation, and Science chipped in to say that governments that spend more on science generally recovered quicker from the recession. You don’t – or shouldn’t – need to be that alert to question whether wealthier countries like Germany, Sweden, Finland and Denmark not needing to cut science spending was more the reason for the correlation rather than the reverse causal pathway – particularly as according to his graph, Poland and Slovakia had the second and third highest levels of GDP growth, whilst coming bottom on R&D investment.

As is to be expected in any twit-storm, however small, the ad hominem attacks came in, but without any indication of self-awareness, the only thing that sparked this rage amongst scientists was the politely worded request for peer-reviewed evidence. Making such a request proved I was an ‘insatiable troll’ with ‘an ideology to substantiate’ and that given my insignificance (harsh, but fair!) ‘no-one owes me anything’. Certainly not decent evidence it seems.

Turning to the Telegraph letter itself, no evidence is given to back up the claim that increases in science expenditure leads to higher GDP, so I turned to the ‘Science is Vital’ website to see where the evidence-based evangelists hide their evidence. Their ‘Show me the numbers’ post does outline that Britain is behind other comparable countries (which is undisputed), but there’s no evidence for the central empirical claim behind the campaign that more government expenditure on science produces higher GDP.
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As it happens, the empirical evidence that higher levels of government expenditure on science produces higher GDP is exceptionally weak, with the most consistent conclusion coming up being that whilst there are pretty strong grounds of thinking that private R&D does increase GDP, there isn’t enough evidence for thinking that state funding of science has the similar effect. Nor is there much ground for concluding that science creates more wealth than the humanities, despite how self-evident and obvious the claim that it does ‘feels’.

Now, you may feel that science is a worthwhile enterprise for its own sake. You may think that a society with more scientists would be a better one. As it happens, I broadly agree, but that is quite a separate argument to the one being made. That is an aesthetic, cultural, or intellectual preference; it is not an empirical claim – and certainly not the argument that the scientists were making today.

You might think that modern scientists restrict themselves to their narrow fields of expertise, but in fact some fundamentalists argue that they can solve pretty much anything. And even the more moderate scientists have ideas above their station. The cream of British Science claims that by spending more money on their areas, the economy will surely develop even though there is not a jot of evidence. These are the respectable faces of the science profession and yet they happily promotes bogus economic treatments.
What this shows is that when it comes to evidence against their interests, scientists and skeptics can be just as irrational and just as indignant and offended (and indeed offensive) by requests to see evidence as the quackiest of quacks. Scientists have today proven themselves incapable of applying the same tests and evidential standards that they so loudly and so repeatedly demand of others. I severely doubt it will be for the last time.