A provocative essay

Ted Goia sees the declining trust in expertise as the harbinger of what I will call a new epistemological era,  comparable to the Renaissance, or the enlightenment, or the rise of the monotheistic religions. He calls it the collapse of the knowledge system. He's a little vague about what he expects to take the place of science as the standard for belief and understanding, and he gets a few things wrong, but it's a conversation starter. He writes:

 

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once.

If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case.The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

Some things he gets wrong:

He exaggerates the so-called "replicability crisis," writing that "40% or more of published studies fail to replicate." This is incorrect, and he evidently did not carefully read the source he cites, or the source on which it is based.  The 39% replication rate is in the field of social psychology only. Two-thirds of studies in other fields of science have been found to replicate. Furthermore, this is not a surprise to actual scientists. We are very well aware of the many reasons why initial findings may not bear up under further scrutiny, and there is an entire field called meta-analysis in which findings from multiple studies of the same research question or phenomenon are combined to yield a more reliable conclusion, based on the well-known fact that they often do not agree. 

 

The real problem is not with science in general, but with the field of social psychology, which unfortunately has developed a non-rigorous culture. Social psychology experiments are typically done with small numbers of subjects, often students in the professor's class, using shoddy methods and testing unlikely premises. In fact, a good deal of fraud has been uncovered in the field. Some of these bogus conclusions make for good TED talks or fodder for marketing consultants, so they get undeserved attention. 

 

Historically, science has often taken wrong turns, or generated heated debates among opposing partisans. This is not new. And yes, wrong ideas can become entrenched for too long. It has been said that we have to wait for their champions to retire or die and a new generation to come up through the ranks to get rid of them. It's a bit too technical for me to go into deeply here, but there is a strong intellectual current at the moment to use Bayesian, rather than frequentist methods for testing hypotheses. Bayesian statistics accommodates uncertainty and allows us to update our degree of confidence in a proposition by updating existing evidence with new observations, and to factor in the plausibility or quality of evidence in the process. As standards for scientific writing start to place more emphasis on the degree of confidence in findings, the replicability problem no longer seems so critical.

 

He is on firmer ground with most of his other observations. Public trust in scientific expertise is certainly on the decline, at least in the U.S. I'll be at a conference all day tomorrow so I may not be able to continue this discussion until Wednesday, but I promise  I will then.