On lying politicians and bullshitting scientists

Greg Sargent writes:

I disagree with Sargent’s statement that “The reason Trump regularly tells lies that are very easy to debunk . . . is to assert the power to say what truth is.” I think it’s simpler than that. People like to say things that make them look better, and this is easier to do if you’re not constrained by the truth.

The big question is not so much why someone who has lied a lot in the past keeps lying—people typically keep doing with what’s worked for them before—but rather why so many of his supporters don’t seem to mind.

And there I’d like to draw a connection to something I’m more familiar with, which is scientists bullshitting. Sometimes out-and-out lying, but more commonly not “lying” exactly, which would imply some awareness of what they’re doing, but rather saying things that sound good even though they are not accurate.

As with political parties, what’s striking to me is not so much that some scientists bullshit, but that the mainstream of the scientific establishment doesn’t seem to care.

When a major psychology journal publishes a paper claiming to be “a long-term study,” and it turns out that the study only spanned 3 days, that’s pretty bad, no? You’d think they’d be kind of embarrassed, no? I’m not taking about the authors here, I’m saying the journal editors would be embarrassed, the head of the psychology society would be embarrassed, etc. Mistakes happen, but this is a pretty bad one. Kind of like the thing about Trump’s lies being so easy to debunk—this is a piece of bullshit that’s particularly easy to catch.

Anyway, the punch line is, No, nobody cares. I care, Retraction Watch cares, whoever got papers rejected by that journal because they were publishing bullshit instead, they probably care, various grad students and postdocs who email me saying they’re upset that their advisors don’t seem to care about getting things right, they care too . . . but that’s about it.

Why don’t they care? They’re committed to the entire enterprise, just as politicians that lie are enabled by members of their party who presumably think that their larger causes will suffer if they were to confront the lies. To be upset about the bullshit would require giving up too much.

P.S. I’m not trying to draw any equivalence between a politician trying to overturn an election and scientists publishing things that don’t make sense. I’m just trying to leverage my from-the-inside understanding of the science bullshit to get some insight into political lies.

P.P.S. If you want to argue on policy grounds that Trump as president did more good than harm, and that if you support a political party’s larger goals you gotta go with who won the primary elections as there’s no alternative . . . sure, you can make that argument. The analogy to the science discussion is to argue that, sure, there are lots of really bad papers, but to draw attention to them would reduce trust in science. You could also make the argument that some amount of bad science is necessary, as the review system isn’t perfect, but if that’s all, then you should be happy with loudly pointing out the b.s. The striking part to me is not when people say, “Yeah, there’s lying but on balance it’s positive,” so much as when people wriggle around and try to deny that the lying or bullshitting is happening.

Indeed, it’s a sad sign of partisan polarization that it seems almost like a political stance to point to a politician’s pattern of lying, in the same way that it’s a sad sign of scientific communication that it seems almost like a form of rabble-rousing to discuss scientific bullshit that just sits in the literature forever.

As I wrote last year (but it could’ve been 5 years ago, or 10 years ago):

Science is kind of like . . . someone poops on the carpet when nobody’s looking, some other people smell the poop and point out the problem, but the owners of the carpet insists that nothing has happened at all and refuses to allow anyone to come and clean up the mess. Sometimes they start shouting at the people who smelled the poop and call them terrorists. Meanwhile, other scientists carefully walk around that portion of the carpet: they smell something but they don’t want to look at it too closely.

P.S. As indicated by this title, this post focuses on the toleration of lies by politicians and scientists, but the topic is more general. “Lies” blurs into “incompetence” (recall Clarke’s Law), and “politicians and scientists” blurs into “anyone who’s trying to sell you something.”