Today a colleague (Philip Phillips) and I published a letter in Science, calling on our scientific professional societies to quit holding meetings in cities with bad police brutality records, especially brutality focused on blacks. (science.sciencemag.org/...) We hope that the resulting economic pressure will help push cities to rein in their often murderous policies. So far we’ve heard mixed reactions, but overall are fairly optimistic. We don’t see this as some special scientific duty, but rather as a basic obligation of all citizens organized in groups large enough to have some effect. We happen to be physicists, so that’s where we started.
On a very different note, two weeks ago I published a paper (advances.sciencemag.org/...) in the journal Science Advances (put out by the same publisher as Science) showing that a widely discussed paper they’d published (advances.sciencemag.org/...) alleging that the GREs (graduate record exams) do not help predict which students will succeed in getting physics PhDs was pure bullshit. My point was not to take a side on the issue of exam use, but rather to say that as scientists we should maintain at least some standards of competence and, more importantly, honesty. The journal, which delayed publishing my article for a year, also published a blatantly dishonest response from the original authors, to which I’ve responded here: arxiv.org/… The point is not that the original article made mistakes, but that they were laughable mistakes, immediately obvious to anyone with some familiarity with the area. One epidemiologist to whom I showed the original paper wrote that it “would have flunked Epi-1”) The actual data in the paper showed that of the predictors they looked at, GREs were the best, although that’s considered a politically incorrect thing to say, and was not the conclusion that they’d received massive NSF funding to reach.
What’s the point of writing about these two publications, other than that they’re my current obsessions? I’m trying to show that we can do two things at once. That is, be conscientious decent citizens and also honest, intelligent scientists. When we think about global warming, vaccines, and pandemics, it’s clear how important it is to get the science right and to maintain reputations for getting it right or at least as right as we can. We’ve seen some terrible examples recently (face mask advice) of scientists sacrificing honesty for short-term utility. We are rightly disgusted when scientists lie to suck up to Trump, tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, etc. for money and career advancement. We should avoid our own version of the same sins.
Maybe it’s best not to rattle on further but rather to invite arguments. And also to invite suggestions on how to make the city boycott tactic more effective.