Holden Thorp Does Not Speak For Me.
A response to the “Time to take stock” by Holden Thorp, Science, Nov. 7, 2004.
Но истина верна: Что вся страна без одного — Уже не вся страна. The basic truth is that unanimous minus one voice is no longer unanimous.
Preamble
On the 25th of August 1968, eight people, eight dissidents, came to the Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.(*) Their demonstration lasted some 5 minutes. It changed the course history. Fifty years later, a poet, a muse, a journalist, and a historian of the dissident movement Natella Boltyanskaya (Нателла Болтянская, *, *) dedicated a song to that momentous and tragic event, several poignant lines of which I chose as the epigraph for this piece; they can be loosely translated as “The basic truth is that unanimous minus one voice is no longer unanimous.”1
Background
On November 5, 2024, a significant majority of American voters rejected the self-proclaimed “party of science” with a legacy candidate at the helm. When I say “a legacy candidate”, what I mean is that according to Nature, a preeminent science journal, not being a scientist herself but being the daughter of a scientist was supposed to carry some weight with the voters: “Health and science have been a part of of Harris’s life since an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, whom Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast-cancer researcher”. Apparently, it didn’t, perhaps, at
least in part, because Harris’ legacy is tainted by her support for the diversity and social justice activism responsible for the damage that has been done to Western academic and social institutions in its name. She lost to Donald Trump, a conman and a charlatan of historic proportions who went as far as inciting a coup to remain in power the last time he was president, and a persona as anti-science as one could imagine after Lysenko’s death, second possibly only to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In many ways, 2024 was the year the Democrats handed the election to Trump
Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, another preeminent science journal—the kind publishing in which makes or breaks careers of aspiring academics and the kind that defines funding and research strategies the world over, wrote a response, of sorts, to the voters “…who feel alienated America’s governmental, social, and economic institutions [that] include science and higher education”. His claim is simple: Trump’s message of “…xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth…” resonates with them. It’s the people’s fault: the people voted wrong. Well… to borrow his own words, “Make no mistake.” Holden Thorp does not speak for me.
Is Trust in Science Actually Declining?
The answer to this question is yes. Even over the last five years, the % of Americans who have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in science and scientists went down by ~ 10%, give or take. However, the details are, as usual, somewhat more subtle and interesting. From the Pew Research Center 2023 report: “Public confidence in scientists and medical scientists remains higher than most other groups and institutions asked about in the survey.” (*)
The sentiment is echoed in their 2024 report: “… scientists continue to be held in higher regard than several other prominent groups we’ve asked about, including journalists, elected officials, business leaders and religious leaders”. (*)
A study that looked into this issue has recently appeared in PNAS, a journal that might be less well known to the general public but that enjoys a status similar to that of Nature or Science among the academics:
What these surveys and studies show is that people continue to trust scientists more, than they do politicians. It follows from this that the more scientists act like politicians, the less the public will trust us. Yet, in recent decades, scientific institutions and individual scientists have been acting more and more like the politicians by engaging in activism and social engineering.
Institutions Embracing Politics and Activism
Examples of political and ideological behavior of various academic institutions, the behavior that has come to be expected and demanded by scientists and students alike, abound. There are the endorsements of Biden and Harris by Nature in 2020 and 2024; there are the endorsements of Biden and Harris by Scientific American in 2020 and 2024—endorsements that do little to sway the voters one way or another, but do, in fact, erode voters’ trust in science.(*)
There’s the history of Scientific American publishing ideologically driven nonsense instead of scientific content under the failed stewardship of Laura Helmuth(*), who went on to post a series of absurd posts accusing Trump voters of being fascists and subsequently resigned from her EIC position.
There are the Soviet propaganda-like statements of the current and former editors of Nature, Science, and Scientific American on science being political, science and politics being inseparable (and when I mention Soviet propaganda, I speak from experience!)—propaganda that found its way into technical journals, such as The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPC Lett.). The politics of physical chemistry must be so much more fascinating to Philip Ball, a former associate editor at Nature, than physical chemistry itself! To me, the very notion that one’s political opinions are of any relevance to the readership of a scientific journal is patently absurd.
Ball’s “Science is political…” piece illustrates just how pervasive and extensive the pollution of scientific journals by ideology has become: JPC Lett. published John M. Herbert’s Words Matter… ideological piece misrepresenting as a simple retraction the purge of editors, referees, and of the article, that happened in another high-level journal, Angewandte Chemie International Edition.(*) John Herbert then went on to publish a similar essay in Digital Discovery, a journal newly established by his co-author, A. Aspuru-Guzik: Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?(*) Note, that we are now talking about right-wing vs. left-wing in a journal focusing on “Data-driven approaches to scientific discoveries”. The essence of both pieces can be summarized in one quote from Herbert himself: “Having been awakened to the inequalities that exist within society, one cannot easily go back to sleep.” (I would add here that the inequalities he is considering are largely imaginary and have been hallucinated by a certain cadre of academics themselves, but that’s a separate issue). The two papers are theological; science is representing itself as a religion. What do the surveys say about public trust for religious leaders? It is quite a bit lower than the public trust for science and scientists. That is where we’re headed.
There’s the Journal of Chemical Education publishing pseudoscience (*); to their credit, they did allow a response debunking the evidence-free claims.(*) There’s the Physical Review - Physics Education Research publishing more ideologically-driven pseudoscience, Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study (*); American Physical Society refused to publish a critique on the grounds that the research paradigm of the critique was “different from the one of the research being critiqued” and that the original study could not be judged by standards common in science… (*).
There’s the Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s pathological Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics (*) is another excellent example of this pollution problem; at least it generated an excellent response by Alan Sokal (*).
I could go on, because the list is nearly endless, but I believe that I made my point regarding scientific institutions promoting activism and acting in a political capacity.
On shared values
Surveys and studies on public trust in science suggest that what people question is not the science, but “… the extent to which scientists’ values align with their own”, and how this alignment—or misalignment—affects the integrity of their findings. What are the values that people expect scientists to align with? According to Holden Thorps of academia, those values are xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth. This disparaging message is nothing new. In fact, this has been the message communicated by individual academics and academic institutions to people on the outside for at least two decades, the message that can be found everywhere, from land acknowledgements to course syllabi. Academics are telling people that they stole “indigenous land”, that they are oppressors, colonizers, racists, misogynists, -phobes of all sorts, fascists, racists, nationalists. It is furthermore alleged that it is up to the enlightened academic elite to show the unwashed masses the path to salvation that lies through admitting one’s sins, accepting one’s guilt, and correcting the way one thinks, speaks, and behaves. Notably, the sins in question, as well as the alleged enlightenment of the accusers, are both imaginary.
It is not only that Holden Thorp and those like him have for decades been dripping disdain for the very people who pay their salaries, travel allowances, and research costs from their taxes; It is not only that his brand of academics have for decades been demonizing those regular voters he is talking about—bus drivers and fast food employees, teachers and policemen, servicemen and businessmen—as some sort of Nazi-adjacent monsters, accusing them of all sorts of imaginary sins. It is that those same people, while being demonized for their desire to live and enjoy normal, safe, and productive lives under the conditions afforded by the freedom and safety of Western civilization, the civilization built on the blood of the brave defenders of its values—those same people have at the same time witnessed the full-throttled support academia threw behind the black lives matter riots and Islamic terrorists—those real, living and breathing Nazis who behead children, rape women, burn entire families alive, and shoot their pet dogs; Hamas supporters were allowed to roam free on academic campuses, attacking people, vandalizing buildings, leaving a mess for the janitors to clean up, and, in general, destroying things built over generations by the very people the academics demonize.
In other words, those voters Holden Thorp is so disdainful of were witnessing the hypocrisy of the academic community, the members of which compromised the truth for political gain—exactly the sin Thorp is accusing his political rivals (Trump supporters) of. Against this backdrop, the surprising part is that trust in science and scientists remains as high as it does. I, for once, have openly stated that post-October 7th, I can no longer trust my colleagues in academia given their support for Hamas.(*)
The erosion of the institutions of science
Advances in science and technology have made our lives what they are. Laptops and mobile phones, the internet and self-driving cars, vaccines, medical diagnostic devices and anti-cancer therapies, all were developed by people who, in one way or another, went through academia and either stayed there or went on to pursue industrial and other creative careers. Mervin Kelly, the American visionary physicists who set up a solid state physics at Bell Labs (and later led Bell Labs) did his PhD under Robert Andrews Millikan of the charge of electron fame (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923). One of the first people Kelly hired for the new solid state physics group was William Shockley, who did his PhD at MIT under John Slater, went on to co-invent the transistor (Nobel Prize in Physics 1956), was a recipient of the Medal of Merit for his war efforts, and played a leading role in the establishment of what became the Silicon Valley.(*) The research that was carried out at Bell Labs fundamentally changed the world, but its very possibility depended on the efforts of academics such as Millikan and Slater, their knowledge, their laboratories, and their courses. Society has nothing to gain, but a lot to lose, from rejecting the institutions and people who spent their lives pushing the boundaries of knowledge, or the fruits of their creative activities. In his piece, Holden Thorp focuses on the attacks from the outside that “…are going to keep coming and probably accelerate for the next 4 years”. Indeed, many of us watched with horror the political farce that was the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearings, witnessed the threats against Anthony Fauci and the rise of the anti-vaccine movement. Yet, with an equal measure of horror, we’ve been watching the once great institutions and traditions of science being eroded by the ideological rot from within. (Much has been written about this rot.*, *, *, ).
It is so easy to slander Darwin and Mendel for their association, perceived or real, with eugenics and the Nazis, as Lysenkoists in the USSR—and more recently, Scientific American—have done.(*) It is far more difficult to discover the laws of nature and to leave a lasting legacy, such as a transistor, Shockley’s racist beliefs notwithstanding, a legacy not of destruction (as that of Lysenko in the USSR and Laura Helmuth at Scientific American), but of a positive contribution to humanity.
I purposely selected Bell Labs as the example above because it is very much an institution of the past; not only does it no longer exist, but I am also not aware of any analogues. This is what we used to have: idea factories, where things like mobile connectivity, transistors, and information theory were invented and developed. Today, what we have instead are alternative reality factories whose leaders compromise truth for political gain and which produce delusions, imaginary identities, fake oppressions, divisiveness, and hatred that, post-October 7th, translated into violence. The priorities of those institutions can be inferred from the examples of Prescod-Weinstein of the white empiricism fame, who did her PhD at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada; hardly the advertisement for the scientific rigor of that institution; and Digital Discovery, where one of John M. Herbert’s theological pieces appeared, that is published is The Royal Society of Chemistry, an organization of great scientific legacy.
The Bottom Line
The institution of science offers a chance of a glimpse of the world that minimizes individual biases and prejudices, because it is greater than any one individual scientist and because its methods, by their very nature, are designed to counteract biases and errors. As any other human endeavor, it is not, and will never be, perfect. It is simply the best tool we have, in part because the recognition of human fallacies and imperfections is built into the scientific method. The more scientists depart from the scientific method in their attempts to assume the roles of political or religious leaders, revolutionaries, arbiters and dictators of morality, the less people will trust us and our institutions. The path to reclaiming public trust begins with a commitment to political neutrality and disengagement from all forms of institutional activism and social engineering ambitions. This includes attempts at rationing the fruits of scholarly labors according to ideological criteria. Knowledge and advances are supposed to be for everyone: Harris voters, Trump voters, and even the band of saboteurs who’ve been systematically destroying the institutions of science through the introduction of social justice and diversity, equity (or equality), and inclusion ideology.
It is often claimed that only a minority of academics have been infected with the ideological virus, while the majority, if silent, are simply trying to get by under the new climate. Perhaps this is the case, but I no longer believe that. For many years, the systems of admission, hiring, evaluation, promotion, advancement, and recognition focused almost exclusively on activism, and this will take decades to repair the damage.(*) What I can state with unequivocal certainty is this. Holden Thorp does not speak for all of us. In particular, he doesn’t speak for me. And, as we know from the history of the Soviet dissident movement, unanimous minus one voice is no longer unanimous.
Post Scriptum: There is Hope.
As I was finishing this piece, there were several positive developments. As I have already mentioned, Laura Helmuth resigned from Scientific American, offering the journal a chance to reclaim its former scientific rigor. Marcia McNutt, the president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, wrote a powerful editorial Science is neither red nor blue, published in Science.(*) The University of Michigan, formerly one of the hubs of diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology squandering some US$15M/year, resolved to no longer solicit diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure.(*) A UofM physics professor offered a relatively mild testimony of the damage done by the DEI initiatives and the black lives matter grift, a testimony that was unthinkable only a few years ago.(*) More generally, in the wake of October 7th, multiple institutions adopted political neutrality. These are important first steps in reversing and repairing the damage that was done to scholarship, research, innovation, and teaching over the decades of woke/DEI insanity.
Holden Thorp has a religion that he is fanatically devoted to. His religion is called ‘woke’. Like any good religion, ‘woke’ has mantras the you must believe. The highest mantra (of his religion) is “transwomen are women” and he believes. Reality (for him) is just an unwelcome distraction. Religious belief comes first.
This is a test, only a test