Introduction to Red Team of Science
The purpose of this newsletter is to help reform the practice of science.
Over the last twenty years, and in the face of the replication crisis in the early 2010s, efforts to reform science have succeeded in educating a small number of people on the problem and possible interventions, but they have not changed practice to a large degree. I believe the reason for this is that these efforts were directed at scientists and not the public.
The next twenty years should focus on increasing understanding of scientific practice and increasing abilities in the general public. The practices I will focus on are the incontrovertible ones, the ones that are supported by simple math. There are, of course, others, and what goes into the equations is not incontrovertible, but the evidence I will focus on is supported by equations.
Part of this is epistemic. We can trust what we can, at least partially, prove. Part of it is strategic. If you want to reform a system, asking the system to vote will not work. The way to override the opinion of the many is with incontrovertible axioms.
Public opinion
If I thought that the public had an accurate view of science, and an accurate understanding, this newsletter would not be necessary. So I am indulging in something I find annoying in science, which is speculation about what people believe now and trying to capture as much public opinion as possible. I've published a metascience reading list starting with an essential 7 papers. I am simply distilling these papers and my goal would be achieved if everyone read them.
Few have read them and so I am indulging in speculation about what people believe and trying to capture as much public opinion as possible. I am adding my own experiences and simplifying the equations.
The speculation is that much of the public believes a myth about science: Science can't help but self-correct. Scientists, journal editors, and schools are principled. They are "mechanically principled." If they see a readout on a machine that says 2, they write 2. If they believe a paper has an error, they retract or correct. If a result is unlikely to be true, they don't try to get anyone to think otherwise. Another way to put this is that scientists are disinterested. Nature speaks and they relay that information without too much bias for personal reasons.
I believed this. I continued to believe this to the greatest degree possible and only chipped away at the belief giving extreme benefit of the doubt. This belief about the practice of science survived a great number of challenges that, looking back, should have made me more skeptical. Though I believed in the replication crisis, I regret not digging into it over ten years ago. I thought science would correct itself shortly, so much so that I was preparing for the revolution to reach data journalism soon.
So if the speculation on what the public believes is dissatisfying, I can say this newsletter is written for an earlier version of myself, or a version who never happened to work in science. No speculation necessary. I was wrong. The myth of disinterestedness is not true.
My next post, "Anecdotes are metascience" comes out in one week, Monday, May 12th, 2025.
Excited!