Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen
By PETER BERKOWITZ
Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?
This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don't possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.
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Academic journals typically adopt a double blind system, concealing the names of both authors and reviewers. But any competent scholar can determine an article's approach or analytical framework within the first few paragraphs. Scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. A few may even have colleagues whose careers, along with those of their graduate students, they would like to tarnish or destroy. There is no check to prevent them from benefiting their friends by providing preferential treatment for their orientation and similarly punishing their enemies.
That's because the peer review process violates a fundamental principle of fairness. We don't allow judges to be parties to a controversy they are adjudicating, and don't permit athletes to umpire games in which they are playing. In both cases the concern is that their interest in the outcome will bias their judgment and corrupt their integrity. So why should we expect scholars, especially operating under the cloak of anonymity, to fairly and honorably evaluate the work of allies and rivals?
Academic journals typically adopt a double blind system, concealing the names of both authors and reviewers. But any competent scholar can determine an article's approach or analytical framework within the first few paragraphs. Scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. A few may even have colleagues whose careers, along with those of their graduate students, they would like to tarnish or destroy. There is no check to prevent them from benefiting their friends by providing preferential treatment for their orientation and similarly punishing their enemies.
That's because the peer review process violates a fundamental principle of fairness. We don't allow judges to be parties to a controversy they are adjudicating, and don't permit athletes to umpire games in which they are playing. In both cases the concern is that their interest in the outcome will bias their judgment and corrupt their integrity. So why should we expect scholars, especially operating under the cloak of anonymity, to fairly and honorably evaluate the work of allies and rivals?
[Cruz, credo!!! Até parece que o Berkowitz lê o meu blog. Traduzindo em graúdos -- o sistema de pareceristas não é mais confiável, e alguma coisa precisa ser feita. Do jeito que está é o que eu chamo de a 'Confraria dos Cabritos tomando conta de hortas']...
Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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Payment needed/Necessário pagamento: The Wall Street Journal
NOTA CAUSTICANTE DESTE BLOGGER:
O que é inquietante é que a Academia e a Grande Mídia internacional e nacional tentaram e tentam 'dourar a pílula' desses cientistas bandidos como se nada de anti-ético tivesse acontecido. Isso é muito perigoso para as democracias -- um bando de intelectuais e formadores de opinião 'bandidos' quer mandar na vida de todos nós na Terra. E violentando a verdade, atropelando carreiras acadêmicas, provocando histeria mundial, praticando 'ciência voodoo'.
Fui, nem sei por que, pensando na resistência dos judeus russos 'refuseniks' dos anos 1970s. Há um documentário sobre eles: Refusenik
