The politics of embarrassment: Part II
Centralized open science
To characterize the degenerating nature of the metascience movement, particularly the overly-political wing of metascience, I will focus on a petition endorsed by, among others, the standard-bearer of metascience, Brian Nosek in response to the “gold standard” executive order. This is hopefully done with humility, and respect for Brian’s work, and with the understanding that it is a cherry pick. I’ll list a few other incidents and offer to publish any rebuttal. I sent Brian a copy of this post on Thursday and requested comment. His response is at the end of this post, and there are two corrections.
In short, section 3 of the executive order represents, in his own words, Brian’s exact principles. The north star of Brian’s Center for Open Science has always been included government intervention with “make it required” at the top of the oft-repeated pyramid of change. Yet something in this relatively milquetoast executive order has led to this petition comparing it to Nazism and Lysenkoism. It’s a pattern reflected in open science’s rejection, or at least mute response to other news in the field: billions of dollars in funding, caps on publication fees and overhead costs, ending the embargo period, and the general call for debate. [Brian correctly points out there’s further response to the order at cos.io.] All of these policies claim to stem from metascience’s core principles and yet metascience rejects them somewhere in the implementation of “make it required.”
I’m trying to stay away from how I would want to “make it required,” and I admit I don’t think the right is objecting to incontrovertible statistics. They just don’t like that science is so liberal, which is another argument about outcomes and not methods. However, this executive order does get into methods and it’s important to know why that too is being rejected.
Like the essay that this series is based on, “Science and Pseudoscience” by Imre Lakatos, the petitioners invoked Lysenkoism on the left. They invoke Nazis on the right. Lakatos was both a victim of the Nazis, and expelled by Moscow in Lysenko’s era. Unlike Lakatos’ call for rationality in the face of these threats to society, the petition calls for ascendance of political truth, and it is a petition. It gets its power from the same place Trump did. A lot of people were willing to sign on.
From the petition:
At face value, this order outlines a supposed commitment to federally funded research that is 'transparent, rigorous, and impactful' and declares that policy is to be informed by 'the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.' However the EO as written will actually undermine scientific rigor and the transparent progress of science. As scientists, we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing.
Anyone who has sat through hundreds of lectures, paper introductions and discussions, policies and other word salad exercises on metascience and open science will recognize these words. The petitioners have simply had their word salad stolen. It wasn't specific or meaningful when they said it either.
When these words were spoken before, truly ad nauseam, did they hide a secret liberal agenda to centralize science behind a sheen of metascientific validity? I’ve never thought so. I’ve considered the liberal bent of metascience to be a byproduct of trying to build a coalition within science that is only 6% conservative. This petition invites opponents of established science, metascience, and open science to deny this word salad — essentially a list of words we associate with truth — has any face value. This might be for the best, but it doesn’t bode well for finding common ground.
“As scientists,” it says, “we are committed to a discipline that is decentralized and self-scrutinizing.” Brian Nosek, his Center for Open Science, and some metascience groups have been planning a centralized metascience organization for years. It was formally announced only one month later.
On self-scrutinizing, Brian deserves some credit. He has invited his critics to speak at events and engaged with them. However, it remains to be seen how responsive he will be to the complaint that metascience and open science is too liberal. I've never seen this objection raised or hypothetically entertained in this community.
There is a non-political way of putting this type of objection without partisanship, namely the framework of progressive and degenerating research programs. However, for the sake of argument let’s put this self-scrutiny to the test. Would Brian and the open science community entertain the scrutiny that it is simply too liberal? I suspect they have not, and will not.
Suppose that, as it probably will, the Trump administration uses these universal principles in its declarations, but then won’t entertain one and only one objection, that it's too conservative.
How absolutely laughable would this be? How silly would the Trump administration look showing its cards like this? That is precisely how, to the degree and for the same reasons, the Center for Open Science, FORRT, and ReproducibiliTea look to conservatives.
Never forget what they've done
Conservative media and social media is filled with lists of links as the petitioners have listed, “look what they did here, here, and here” or “never forget what they did.” The fact that the petitioners put together such a list is not surprising. I even agree with much of it. Canceling grants because they’re too liberal is not Lakatosian.
All I will say in the conservative defense is imagine that science was dominated by religious people. I've taken the conservative complaint about science and replaced “liberal” with “religious”:
Imagine a world in which, for fifty years, non-religious people had been complaining that behind all the supposedly rigorous, math-based results of science was a hidden, religious agenda. Non-religious results were filtered out, either by the researchers themselves or journals, or non-religious results were protested so vigorously by religious people and so many editors thrown out that in the end the scientific literature is, as a whole, simply too religious. It’s hard to say exactly how much, and particularly because religious people get to point to all of the religious results that have already been found as scientific support. Many people excuse the whole thing by saying, “well, reality has a religious bias.”
It may come to pass, then, that once the non-religious manage to vote in a non-religious president willing to take on this issue, this president may have difficulty sorting through the millions of scientific articles and the billions in scientific grants to find exactly where religiousness has had a major effect.
Religious people may then complain that grants are being canceled just because they have the word “faith” in them. They may point to all the good work done for AIDS, homelessness, and orphans by religious organizations. Would you want all this to stop?
Find-and-replace arguments have never been effective on partisans. They were not effective for the (literally) religious people in the thousands of years of religious history when one group with devoutly religious people would encounter another group from another part of the world. Why does it matter how strongly you believe these things? As Lakatos put it, “the history of thought shows us that many people were totally committed to absurd beliefs. If the strengths of beliefs were a hallmark of knowledge, we should have to rank some tales about demons, angels, devils, and of heaven and hell as knowledge.”
Nonetheless, this is an argument that the list of complaints about canceled grants in the petition has some merit. However, the list is mostly just maximally offensive to liberals and that is why it was chosen. Liberals may not realize how truly and deeply offended conservatives are by other lists.
These lists of grievances are faulty demarcations. Some of metascience has decided to draw the line of demarcation at political appointees. Some like to list climate and vaccine science. Very few science authors will choose equivalents on the right, and very few will admit that we've found all kinds of evidence that science is — broadly — half wrong.
Some authors go straight for the jugular and invoke childhood leukemia. We don’t need philosophy of science to suggest these topics. A PR firm could have come up with them.
They are not demarcations. The demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not drawn around RFK’s latest quotes, or even around topics like vaccine skepticism. It is not drawn at political appointees. These are demarcations of political embarrassment. They are chosen so no one will disagree.
The sex binary
This is a claim made strongly enough in the petition to refute on universal grounds: “the order comes from an administration that... incorrectly defined sex determination as binary, when biology proves it is not.”
Biology doesn’t prove anything.
Scientists in normal practice claiming to have proven something are laughed out of rooms, and denied publication. There are reams of philosophy of science and normal science to support this: Hume, Duhem-Quine, Bayes. Lakatos put the history of science thusly, that to counter the absolute facts of the Catholic Church, science was originally absolute in its statements. This has not only gone away, but the most famous early statements of proof were overturned by Einstein.
There may be more entertaining ways of demonstrating that scientists don't generally talk about proving anything other than to point at an infinite regress. Do these 10,000 petitioners and their many thousands of papers ever say they “proved” anything? There could be an odd case. The authors of the petition argued against their own words, announcing it in The Guardian, saying “Science does not proceed by sequentially establishing unassailable conclusions.” Even climate change and vaccine safety they describe as “robust, valid conclusions,” not proven.
The particular claim of the sex binary was recently taken up by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). Having published a blog post about how sex is a spectrum, several distinguished board members resigned and posted a scathing critique, which not only disputes the sex spectrum, its complaints about FFRF mirror this complaint about metascience institutions.
The scientific consensus on the sex binary was hinted at when 58% of UK researchers said they believe in the sex binary in 2024. This is not to say that scientific consensus is right, only that this proof doesn't seem to have convinced many people. When, how, and by whom the proof occurred is not answered in the petition.
A synopsis of the FFRF incident was written up by the “Friendly Atheist” in which he calls the resignation of Pinker, Coyne, and Dawkins “the trash taking itself out” and suggests the atheist community cut ties with FFRF. If you are part of the 58% and you can read the Friendly Atheist’s post without fearing that you and your organization would be subject to global online humiliation as a result of your views, you may have transcended the politics of embarrassment.
The organizer of the petition, Colette Delawalla, regularly uses the sex binary and published a preprint saying, “The sample represented all 50 states, approximately half were female (50.8%), and 58% were white, 21% Black, 15% Hispanic, and 5% Asian” a week before the petition.1 The fact that the coauthors, a Nobel laureate, the head of the metascience alliance, and a man who wrote “Calling Bullshit” didn't object to the “proof” wording illustrates science in 2025. Politics is in charge. (The coauthors also use the sex binary, in some cases on LGBTQ issues and on gender disparities.)
This is all indecisive rhetoric, though. Liberal and conservative science can go around in circles making claims like this without anything being overturned. Showing something is “too liberal” just as it is to show something is “too conservative” is not enough for partisans. Something needs to be shown to not be true, at least to the best of our abilities in a universe without proof.
The Lakatosian argument against the sex spectrum is first to ask adherents, “at what point would you give up on the idea of a sex spectrum?” If there is no evidence that would convince you that sex is not a spectrum, then there's no evidence that has convinced you that it is a spectrum. This is true in a Popperian sense that the demarcation between science and pseudoscience is this exact point, that your beliefs can be falsified. And it is true in a trivial way that all the evidence used to support the spectrum may have been due to some kind of error, of which there are many in science.
Lakatos pointed out that saying “never” is primarily done for ethical reasons. A “good” and moral sex spectrum adherent is not going to go on the record saying that they could start to believe in the sex binary.
Another response would be to ask what the sex spectrum predicts. Is there some state of nature that could be discovered that would contradict it? Almost by definition, no. No species could be discovered, no result found that the sex spectrum could have made a novel prediction about. Any prediction from the large and small ova camp can be accommodated automatically by simply pointing out some remaining uncertainty. The bar is quite low for a spectrum argument. Spectrum-ites don't even need to place a phenomenon on the spectrum, which could be falsified by results that show the thing is actually at a different spot on the spectrum.
The large and small ova camp can predict that a new species will produce large nourishing ova, and small ova meant only to temporarily carry genetic material. This could be falsified by a species in which the nourishment function of the ova is shared to such a degree that the dichotomy is unclear, or a species whose ova nourishment comes mutually from the environment. I don't know if such a species exists, and with apologies to Dawkins and Coyne if I am fumbling the argument, I'm willing to lose a few points for the team. I can't write a series about embarrassment without risking any of my own.
The fallaciousness of the spectrum argument can be demonstrated by omission. If it had been proven, the petitioners could have named even one other sex that has been “proven” to exist. The rhetorical answer to this is that there isn't another nameable sex. Different sex determinations all go into an indeterminate goo about which we cannot make further claims.
This is the argument that the sex spectrum research program does not progress. It doesn't make novel predictions. It has a protective belt that protects by definition. It's not falsifiable. And its adherents won't admit what would work against it.
Even if this is not convincing, and it probably won't be, (Dawkins and Coyne still disagree about exactly where intersexuality fits into the debate) I have a lower bar in mind. The far left is not a scientific antidote to the far right. The deference to nature is gone from this petition because the far left has no intention of sharing power with her, now or ever. The answer is incontrovertible principles of thought. General enough to agree on and certain enough to steer us away from both Lysenko and Nazis.
Scientific misconduct
The petition says, “direct presidential appointees are given broad latitude to designate many common and important scientific activities as scientific misconduct.”
The executive order defines scientific misconduct:
“Scientific misconduct” means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, reviewing, or reporting the results of scientific research, but does not include honest error or differences of opinion.
For the purposes of this definition;
(i) “fabrication” is making up data or results and recording or reporting them;
(ii) “falsification” is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record; and
(iii) “plagiarism” is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.
In a word, this is correct. These are the correct definitions of these words in terms of their usage, and correct in a moral sense that these are good lines to draw between types of behavior. (FORRT defines these terms similarly in its code of conduct, which has laudable goals but is much more a liberal document ripe for abuse than the EO is a conservative one.)
Researchers should not be engaging in these behaviors as “common and important scientific activities,” not only should they be penalized as recipients of federal grants, they are already penalized for these behaviors. So the order's treatment of scientific misconduct is a particularly poor way to criticize it.
Executive orders
Most of this post is concerned with how poorly the metascience and open science movement's approach to politics is supported by any philosophical underpinning other than a partisan one. I suspect that, to compensate for researchers’ general loss of scientific status that needing to be more rigorous imposes, the metascience movement is offering researchers political power. That, or metascience is taking a trojan horse approach that mirrors its fawning assumptions of good faith.
For that purpose, the reaction to this order has been illustrative. Executive orders are, however, a weaker execution of democracy than laws passed through congress. Although I think the executive order is much more banal than its critics claim, the criticism that this is an executive order at all lands. Both the arguments that something like this should go through congress, and the argument that government shouldn’t be so specific even with replication, which is difficult to measure and never gives a binary answer, have merit.
If “make it required” was known to be something that could be hijacked to cost humanity millions of lives or a new holocaust, the Center for Open Science could have said, at least, that this doesn’t mean state dictated scientific truths in the way the petition uses this term.
“State dictated scientific truths” is, of course, too broad to encompass the fact that the state dictates that court cases should be decided on evidence, and randomized controlled trials should be based on sound scientific principles like preregistration, and the extremes of Lysenkoism and Nazism.
Some specifics are necessary. That the executive order was written by a party you don't agree with or even a person you don't agree with, or are suspicious of, doesn't count. Keep in mind suspicion goes both ways. We need to bridge suspicion on principles.
Conclusion
I’ve framed this debate around Lakatosian philosophy of science, and his essay “Science and Pseudoscience,” and the anti-Lakatosian phenomenon risk of global online infamy. There are many framings that would work. Furthermore, evaluating political movements and scientific programs once you know the progressing/degenerating framework is not particularly hard. Evaluating whether or not something is affected by the omnipresent internet embarrassment is not hard either. Many so-called discoveries and advancements like this blog post in this era of self-censorship may not be true leaps forward because everyone already knows them. They just can’t say anything.
Nonetheless, these things must be said. It’s better to do them with as much epistemic support as possible. Maybe this is not useful for convincing the individual. It is for giving the individual cover against the online mob of either political tribe.
One limitation to this series is that I may have the arrow of causation in the wrong direction. It could be that both the executive order, and the whole of metascience were already Lakatosian because he helped inspire them. So what we’re seeing is not failure to listen to his principles but failure of human beings to follow through with the personal sacrifices they entail. It suggests that maybe as individuals we need to start bearing those sacrifices without knowing that an end point is in sight.
Brian was able to respond briefly given the time frame. I am used to giving long response periods with no response, so I appreciate this very much. Future amendments will go here, and I will link to statements from any of the above organizations on the topic of bridging the political divide.
Response from Brian Nosek
“The north star of Brian’s Center for Open Science has always been government intervention with “make it required” at the top of the oft-repeated pyramid of change.” This is false. The pyramid is a behavior change model. That is, it is a general model for how to change any behavior. It suggests that gaining 100% adoption of a behavior ultimately necessitates the behavior being required, ideally with the other elements in place so that people can do the behavior effectively. The pyramid does not itself indicate: which behavior(s), whether any given behavior *should* be ultimately be required, and *who* should do the requiring. We use the behavior change model to guide how we organize our behavior change efforts. Importantly, there are many reasons to stop and even reverse course in the behavior change model depending on the evidence of effectiveness for the behavior. Some behaviors might be tried and shown to be ineffective; others might work in some contexts and not others; some might be too costly to implement even if they would be useful. COS uses an iterative approach of testing and engaging communities on behavior change to determine whether and how the behaviors can be effective in their context. As evidence of effectiveness accumulates, so do efforts to move along the pyramid. That process is dynamic and iterative. You can see an example of how we specify that process in this grant proposal for testing the value of preregistration in the biological sciences, https://osf.io/r3txm (see Figure 1 for an overview).
You ask whether science or metascience is too liberal. My personal view is that I have benefited greatly in my research from collaboration and exchange with people that have different points of view. For example, some of my most exciting and productive collaborations have been with a close colleague, Jon Haidt (e.g., https://www.projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/GHN2009.pdf). He and I differ on assumptions and perspective on many topics, but I loved collaborating with him because we were constantly testing each other's assumptions. So, I support a scholarly environment that is rich with competing perspectives that engage with each other in a shared commitment to knowledge production. That perspective, however, is not the same as the current political environment. The current US administration — which I perceive as neither conservative nor Republican based on how I understand what that party used to be — is not productively engaging or supporting free and open scholarly inquiry. And, on the Executive Order for gold-standard science in particular, it is co-opting terms while embedding implementation directives that are counterproductive to those aims. COS's comment about it is here: https://www.cos.io/about/news/cos-statement-on-restoring-gold-standard-science-executive-order. I will continue to engage with the administration as federal support for science is critically important. I hope that the orientation shifts toward being a productive partner to ensuring that the US retains its leadership role in science and innovation.
Footnotes
There are both intersex and gender identity counts listed at the end of this paper, although they are not used. The summary “Female: (50.8%)” doesn’t deny the existence of a third sex designation (intersex) and neither do the other papers. However, this does suggest the author’s scientific treatment of sex is not unlike Coyne and Dawkins, or 58% of UK scientists.