'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

Watson wasn't crucified, or anything remotely analogous to it, his comments weren't particularly reasonable, and even his own near immediate apology explicitly noted that there was no scientific basis for them. (Though he has since returned to repeating them; the whole thing is weird since at the time he first made them, there was a very recent piece of work which could have been cited as support for the geography/IQ link he suggested, but in between then and the time he went back to issuing them that work had been torn apart for gross methodological errors, including deliberately excluding data to fit the intended conclusion.)

> Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four.

He wasn't stripped of a Nobel prize, and he absolutely wasn't suggesting two plus two may equal four; he made an at best thinly supported claim about geography and IQ combined with a completely unsubstantiated claim about the premises of development policy toward Africa, and drew a dire conclusion from that combination.

The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal.

However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies from academics saying they're afraid to even voice conservative ideas in academia let alone apply for grant funding for them, and the work of people like Jonathan Haight who showed fields like psychology are dominated by one political ideology.

To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. To name just two:

1. Climate change skepticism. All the research I've seen here is done by academic outsiders. They find real problems, publish papers and get real retractions or changes made in the field, but none of it is done by academia itself. When you read the various emails showing how academics try to block people who disagree with them from getting published, it's obvious what's going on.

2. Men's rights. Academia churns out vast amounts of "research" into various feminist and intersectionalist topics. I've seen very few papers on anything approximating the male opposite. The small amount that does exist tends to come out of psychological research into education in the context of why boys are falling behind at school (they find some worrying things about teacher bias). But it's an occasional dot compared to the torrent of government-funded feminist thought.

The problem with areas of inquiry like these is that leftists attack them as not only illegitimate to study at all, but to even talk about. This is despite the fact that they're both completely mainstream sets of views.

> “The one aspect of the Jewish brain that is not first class is that Jews are said to be bad in thinking in three dimensions.. it is true” – Watson

> Sorry but these are racist and misogynist in a direct way. In what high school were you taught to read deliberations about Jewish brains as “rude comments about people in general”. That would also explain your curious view on what biology is. – some busybody

> Different studies have found different results, but most have found well above-average verbal and mathematical intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, along with slightly below-average spatial intelligence,[2][3] producing an average IQ score in the range of roughly 107 to 115, well above the general mean of 100.[4][5][6][7] – Wikipedia*

He was supremely politically incorrect and unconcerned with how his views might be misrepresented. However, here we see that he was factually correct (inasmuch as intelligence is function of the brain) and, also, simply expessing mainstream scientific views.

To someone who is not yet a true believer, you are only further confirming that his cancellation was part of general ideological assault on science. He "worked very long and hard to get himself fired" by saying things he as someone who respects and understands science believed.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

That said I've read a whole bunch of essays by scientists whose research couldn't be published for explicitly stated ideological reasons over time, like this one:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

The problem is this is circular: you reached your conclusions based on the output of the academic system (presumably).

I used to think like this, that if most scientists agreed on something it was very likely to be true, that mistakes by whole fields were exceptionally rare and remarkable events, and that groupthink wasn't very powerful.

Over the years I've been faced with evidence that I was wrong about those things, over and over again. Now I think if most scientists agree on a topic where you can't run extremely rigorous experiments then it's quite likely to be wrong, that mistakes by whole fields are very common and groupthink is extremely powerful.

I do think there's a culture at the edge of science ...

Science is almost entirely funded by governments. In some fields there's more diversity than others, but it's notable that the fields that seem to have the biggest problems and most controversies attached are the ones where there's little private sector involvement. If groupthink sets in, and due to the lack of any feedback loops from outside the academic system that is clearly a problem in academia, then almost by definition anything that's taboo will be at the "edge of science" even if it's right.