How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science
By Allysia Finley, Oct. 1, 2023, WSJ
Scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., acknowledged that he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published. Credit to him for being honest about something his peers also do but are loath to admit.

In an essay for the Free Press, Mr. Brown explained that he omitted “key aspects other than climate change” from a paper on California wildfires because such details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.” Editors of scientific journals, he wrote, “have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, denied that the journal has “a preferred narrative.” No doubt the editors at the New York Times and ProPublica would say the same of their own pages.

Mr. Brown’s criticisms aren’t new. In 2005 Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He contended that scientists “may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.”

“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Dr. Ioannidis argued. “Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.”

In addition, many scientists use the peer-review process to suppress findings that challenge their own beliefs, which perpetuates “false dogma..” As Dr. Ioannidis explained, the more scientists there are in a field, the more competition there is to get published and the more likely they are to produce “impressive ‘positive’ results” and “extreme research claims.”

The same dynamic applies to Covid research. A July study in the Journal of the American Medical Association purported to find higher rates of excess deaths among Republican voters in Florida and Ohio after vaccines had been rolled out. Differences in partisan vaccination attitude, the study concluded, may have contributed to the “severity and trajectory of the pandemic.”

But the study lacked information on individuals’ vaccination and cause of death. It also didn’t adjust for confounding variables, such as underlying health conditions and behaviors. Charts buried in the study’s appendix showed excess deaths among older Republicans started to exceed Democrats in mid-2020—well before vaccines were available.

Despite these flaws, the study was published and pumped by left-wing journalists because it promoted their preferred narrative. The peer-review process is supposed to flag problems in studies that get submitted to journals. But as Dr. Ioannidis explained in a Sept. 22 JAMA editorial, the process is failing: “Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society.” Those “stakeholders” include the scientific journals themselves, which he notes have among the highest profit margins of any industry—by some estimates, about 40%.

Journals often don’t compensate peer reviewers, which can result in perfunctory work. The bigger problem is that reviewers often disregard a study’s flaws when its conclusions reinforce their own biases. One result is that “a large share of what is published may not be replicable or is obviously false,” Dr. Ioannidis notes. “Even outright fraud may be becoming more common.”

As scientists struggle to publish against-the-grain research, many are turning to preprint servers—online academic repositories—to debunk studies in mainstream journals. Yet even some of those sites, such as the Social Science Research Network, are blocking studies that don’t fit preapproved narratives.

In Jan 2022, Johns Hopkins Univ. economist Steve H. Hanke reported that Covid lockdowns had little effect on deaths. When he attempted to publish the findings on SSRN, the site turned him down. “Given the need to be cautious about posting medical content, SSRN is selective on the papers we post,” a rejection notice informed Mr. Hanke.

That’s the same response the site gave UC San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad when rejecting his studies debunking widely cited Covid studies, such as one claiming Boston schools’ mask mandate reduced cases. SSRN is run by the company Elsevier, which also publishes prominent medical journals that uniformly promote Covid orthodoxy.

Scientific journals and preprint servers aren’t selective about research quality. They’re selective about the conclusions. If experts want to know why so many Americans don’t trust “science,” they have their answer. Too many scientists no longer care about science.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-preapproved-narratives-corrupt-science-false-studies-covid-climate-change-5bee0844

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The Censoring of Science and the Road to Serfdom
LETTERS, Oct. 8, 2023, WSJ
Thanks are due to Allysia Finley for alerting the public to the censorship of counternarrative science (“How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science,” Life Science, Oct. 2). An account of censorship perpetrated by Social Science Research Network and medRxiv is provided in a new article in Econ Journal Watch by Jay Bhattacharya and Steve Hanke.

In one chapter of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), Friedrich Hayek writes of the urge toward censorship in antiliberal regimes. “Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed,” he writes. Propaganda from the government is not sufficient: “The plan itself in every detail . . . must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism.”

Consider the following sentence of Hayek’s in light of the Covid experience, along with the asides I insert: “The basis of unfavorable comparison [the savaging of Sweden’s minimal lockdown policy], the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken [e.g., focused protection], information which might suggest failure on the part of the government [the lockdown study by Prof. Hanke and co-authors, information about vaccine safety and efficacy, etc.]—all will be suppressed.”

Down the road to serfdom, in the sciences themselves, Hayek says, the “search for truth cannot be allowed” and “vindication of the official views becomes the sole object.” In scholarly disciplines, he continues, “the pretense that they search for truth is abandoned and . . . the authorities decide what doctrines ought to be taught and published.”

Hayek sounded the alarm because he saw how things unfolded on the European continent. The further we go down the antiliberal road, the more fragile and vulnerable are official narratives to criticism. As a result, Hayek says, “intolerance . . . is openly extolled” by the mind-guards and minions of official narratives.

Hayek’s point was not what Yogi Berra had in mind when he said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” But the point fits.

Prof. Daniel Klein, George Mason Univ., Chief Editor, Econ Journal Watch

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-science-censorship-hayek-fa5c568b

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Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With ‘Social Justice’
By Jason L. Riley, Oct. 6, 2023, WSJ
Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).

In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”

The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”

Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.”