Our Defense of Merit in Science

Now Out in The Journal of Controversial Ideas

The full article can be found here. The Wall Street Journal op ed on it, by 2 of the authors, can be found here. It is behind a paywall, but, hey, my Substack isn’t, so I summarize and excerpt the article here.

The Team that Wrote the Article

Authorship is listed alphabetically, but the prime mover was Anna Krylov, who has written several terrific essays contesting the radical activist and “critical” turn in academia, including The Perils of Politicizing Science and Scientists Must Resist Cancel Culture. The superscripts were for each author’s institutional affiliation and can be found at the end of this essay. It was a diverse group in almost every way that matters (politically, internationally, academic discipline), including ways that progressives seem to selectively care about (racial/ethnic, gender).

Summary of In Defense of Merit in Science

Abstract

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

Excerpts

Excerpts appear as bulleted points in italics. My additional commentary appears in regular font without bullets. For readability, I have removed all footnotes and references (see the paper if you are interested). All quotes are sourced in the original paper. All excerpts are directly from the paper; however, for readability of this essay, they are not necessarily in the order they appear in the paper.

• Science provided solutions to such calamities as famine and plague, transforming them “from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges.” By improving the world economy and increasing global wealth, scientific progress helped create a more peaceful and just world. Science eradicated smallpox, discovered penicillin, decoded the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a weekend, helped to halve the maternal and child mortality rate globally, revolutionized agriculture, contributed to extending life expectancy in every country, and has generally granted humanity the gifts of life, health, wealth, knowledge, and freedom. By increasing literacy and communication, science has promoted empathy and rational problem-solving, contributing to a global decline in violence of all forms.

Of course, the world has many problems, from poverty to war, from disease to mass murder. Although some of these problems may never disappear or are not amenable to scientific solutions, science-that-aspires-to-objectivity and political neutrality-informed policy is, we argue, often crucial to addressing many of them:

• science alone is not sufficient: science is but a tool that can be used for good and bad. It is our responsibility, as a society, to use it responsibly, ethically, and effectively.

Nonetheless:

• Fulfilling this responsibility, however, is being hindered by a new, alarming clash between liberal epistemology and identity-based ideologies. Liberal epistemology prizes free and open inquiry, values vigorous discourse and debate, and determines the best scientific ideas by separating those that are true from those that are likely not. The statuses, identities, and demographics of scientists are irrelevant to this great sifting of valid versus invalid ideas.

• In contrast, identity-based ideologies seek to replace these core liberal principles, essential for scientific and technological advances, with principles derived from postmodernism and “Critical Social Justice” (CSJ), which assert that modern science is “racist,” “patriarchal,” and “colonial,” and a tool of oppression rather than a tool to promote human flourishing and global common good.

We reject most of “standpoint epistemology” as a basis for science:

• Liberal epistemology implies that “positionality statements” (in which scientists disclose their demographic identity memberships and which are now being advocated throughout academia) have no value in evaluations of scientific claims, since the validity of a truth claim cannot be evaluated by knowing the claimants’ tribal or demographic affiliations. In liberal epistemology, the validity of truth claims can only be evaluated by evidence and the logic of inferential processes linking that evidence to further conclusions.

Why science?

• The scientific method has proven an effective tool for revealing objective truths about the natural world. These truths are not final and immutable, but provisional—open to challenge and refinement as knowledge expands.

How should science work?

• In liberal epistemology, the validity of truth claims can only be evaluated by evidence and the logic of inferential processes linking that evidence to further conclusions.

In short, truth is established via robust debate and discourse that incudes both scientists and nonscientists. The paper includes a brief review of Rauch’s ideas beautifully articulated in Kindly Inquisitors and The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth:

• provisional truth is attainable

• a truth claim can be made only if it is testable and withstands attempts to debunk it

• no one has personal authority over a truth claim

• truth claims cannot be less valid by virtue of the claimant’s membership in any particular group

• the validity of a truth claim cannot be evaluated by knowing the claimants’ tribal or demographic affiliations

• In liberal epistemology, the validity of truth claims can only be evaluated by evidence and the logic of inferential processes linking that evidence to further conclusions.

One criticism of earlier drafts we received was along the lines of "you are painting with too broad a brush; not all feminists or critical theorists oppose evidence, discourse, or objectivity.” And they were right!

• evaluating the quality of that evidence or the validity of the inferential processes is itself a social process, a point upon which some liberal and feminist philosophers agree. In both Rauch’s and Longino’s [feminist] perspective, no one has final say; scientific truths are determined by an ongoing social process that includes discussion, debate, and criticism until a broad consensus is reached (and which can be challenged by new evidence and arguments).

On the role of intellectual diversity in scientific objectivity, error-correction, and validity:

• Further, reality-based scientific communities must be open to conceding and correcting errors. The ability of science to self-correct—one reason that scientific truth claims are uniquely credible—can be epistemically contrasted with conformity to religious and political dogmas, which are disturbingly closed to self-correction. Self-correction is facilitated by pluralism to maintain intellectual diversity and maximize the chances of uncovering provisional truths. Intellectual diversity ensures vigorous skeptical vetting of scientific claims by a critical mass of doubters who ultimately accept being bound by objective truths once they have been rigorously determined by extensive evidence.

Science is under political attack

• These core principles, which have served us well for centuries, are under attack by ideologies originating in postmodernism and Critical Theory, versions of which reject objective reality in favor of “multiple narratives” promulgated by different identity groups and “alternative ways of knowing.” They engender “radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable” and “a commitment to cultural constructivism,” which asserts that knowledge and reality are a product of their cultural context. (Sources for the quotes are in the references to the article).

• These perspectives often view science as a tool of power and are hostile to the central liberal principle of free inquiry and open discussion and are closed to calls to justify their claims on scientific grounds.

• These ideologies are increasingly finding their way into politics, culture, and education and are negatively affecting science, medicine, technology, psychology, and global health. They are not imposed by totalitarian regimes, but spread by activists and abetted by university administrators and business leaders who fail to protect their institutions from these illiberal, regressive ideas.

• The genesis of these ideologies is often obscure to the public or even to their bearers—e.g., administrators trained in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)—who are unlikely to have read Gramsci, Derrida, Foucault, Bell, Crenshaw, and Delgado. But just as a Soviet apparatchik need not have read Das Kapital to have been an agent ensuring conformity to Marxist doctrine, one need not be fully versed in postmodern or CRT-inspired scholarship to be implementing the ideology. The problems emerge from doctrinaire implementation, not from deep knowledge of the scholarship.

• Critical Theory and CSJ conflict with the liberal Enlightenment. According to Delgado and Stefancic, their characteristic elements include anti-rationalism; anti-enlightenment; rejection of equal treatment, philosophical liberalism, and neutrality in law; standpoint epistemology and subjectivism as the basis of knowledge; and intersectionality.

• CSJ is not an empirical theory, because its tenets are maintained despite their being either demonstrably false or unfalsifiable. The existence of objective reality, for example, which CSJ denies, is attested to by every successful engineering project, from bridges to satellites, from cell phones to electric cars, ever conducted. The fallibility of “lived experience” is attested to by a wealth of psychological research demonstrating errors and biases in self-reports.

• The CSJ view—that institutions of knowledge, art, and law perpetuate systemic racism and, therefore, must be dismantled, and that merit-based criteria in hiring, publishing, and funding must be replaced with CSJ criteria—has been aggressively advanced by many of our academic leadership—university administrators, executive bodies of professional societies, publishers, etc. A search for “racism” in the titles of papers published by the Science and Nature Publishing groups returns hundreds of hits such as “NIH Apologizes for ‘Structural Racism,’ Pledges Change,” “Dismantling Systemic Racism in Science,”and “Systemic Racism in Higher Education.” This reflects the axiomatic ideological perspective of CSJ that systemic racism is indelibly etched into every Western institution. The perspective is taken as an article of faith, which is why some have argued that CSJ is more a secular religion than an evidence-based science.

I cannot resist pointing out that some have argued that this comparison of CSJ to religion is unfair to religion. See Comparing Wokeness to Christianity Is an Insult to the Church, which starts with this: “To the extent social-justice extremism resembles a puritanical faith, it’s one that provides believers with no grace and no hope of redemption.”

The attack is incoherent

• If there is no objectivity, then their claims are not objectively true. If their claims cannot possibly be objectively true, there is no reason for anyone to believe them. Their claims warrant serious consideration only if they might actually be true—which requires at least the possibility of objectivity.

Merit-based science is fair and inclusive

• Science knows no ethnicity, gender, or religion. Of course, by itself, universalism does not prevent the personal views of scientists, which are influenced by culture and society, from affecting the practice of science. Indeed, scientists have not always lived up to the ideals of fairness and impartiality in evaluating merit. In the past, scientific culture contributed to the exclusion of various groups from the scientific enterprise.

• However, the shortcomings of individuals or the community should not be confused with the science itself. Whether sexism prevented Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin from receiving credit for her conclusion that the Sun was made mostly of hydrogen is irrelevant to the fact that the Sun is made mostly of hydrogen.

• Although there are feminist critiques of how glaciologists have conducted themselves, there is no such thing as “feminist glaciology,” just as there is no “queer chemistry,” “Jewish physics,” “white mathematics,” “indigenous science,” or “feminist astronomy.” Glacial, physical, genetic, or prehistoric phenomena are independent of the positionality of the scientist. By prioritizing the truth value of scientific research, personal influences of individual scientists are minimized.

• Merit-based science is truly fair and inclusive. It provides a ladder of opportunity and a fair chance of success for those possessing the necessary skills or talents. Neither socio-economic privilege nor elite education is necessary. Indeed, several co-authors of this perspective have built successful careers in science, despite being immigrants, coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and not being products of “elite education” (see authors’ biographies).

• the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was developed by scientists with an immigrant background (Hungarian and Turkish) who built successful careers in Germany. Likewise, the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, came from a poor adoptive family and did not have access to regular education.

• Merit is a vehicle for upward mobility. Recruiting, developing, and promoting individuals based on their talent, skills, and achievements has enabled many who started life in disadvantaged conditions to realize their dreams and build better lives. Imperfections in a merit-based system are not grounds for dismantling or “disrupting” it. Changes to an effective system should occur only when the superiority of the alternative has been demonstrated. There is no evidence that CSJ [critical social justice] produces better mathematics, physics, or chemistry, and it has already damaged medicine and psychiatry.

• While some might argue that CSJ has improved science by “disrupting” the barriers to entry for marginalized groups, those barriers had been falling for decades, without any help from CSJ dogmas, and long before CSJ rose to prominence and power. For example, in 1970, women received about 10% of all doctoral degrees in the U.S.; by 2006, they were receiving the majority.

How to limit scientists’ biases? Focus on merit

• two questions are central to the evaluation of scientific merit: (1) How important is the finding? (2) How strongly does the evidence presented indicate that the main claims are true?

• Astronomers may value the discovery of a new exoplanet more than material scientists value improvements in ceramic tensile strength, but this is normal science and can be threshed out among scientists. The identity or “positionality” of the authors is irrelevant.

• Qualitative and subjective judgments are also important. There may be genuine differences of opinion about whether mentoring one student who goes on to be an academic research star is a greater or lesser accomplishment than mentoring five students, four of whom go into industry and one who becomes an academic at a small liberal arts college. But the value of just counting, however imperfect, should be obvious: all else equal, mentoring one star is better than mentoring no stars; mentoring four students who go on to professional careers in industry is more of an accomplishment than mentoring none.

The perils of replacing merit with social engineering and ideological control

• In the Soviet Union the aberrations of Trofim Lysenko had catastrophic consequences for science and society.17 An agronomist and “people’s scientist” who came from the “superior” class of poor peasants, Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics because of its supposed inconsistency with Marxist ideology. Dissent from Lysenko’s ideas was outlawed and his opponents were fired or prosecuted. Lysenko’s ideologically infused agricultural ideas were put into practice in the USSR and China, where, in both countries, they led to decreased crop yields and famine. More on this at Lysenkoism Then and Now.

• Today, biology is again being subjugated to ideology—medical schools deny the biological basis of sex, biology courses avoid teaching the heritability of traits, and so on.

• Such analysis is often dismissed with vague deflections such as “everything is political” and “everyone is biased.” There is an element of truth to these declarations, which can help raise awareness of the potential of scientists to have biases, including biases on politicized topics, and help minimize such biases. However, those making these arguments often use them to impose their own ideological agendas on what can be studied and what kind of answers are permissible. It is this sense of the “politicization of science” that we categorically oppose.

• CSJ-driven pedagogy can be pernicious, even when proposed innovations appear benign. For example, the proposed “curriculum decolonization” in pharmacology involves teaching about drugs developed from folk remedies and focusing on the contributions of non-Europeans. While such topics might be appropriate for a history of medicine course, centering the curriculum around them, as has been proposed, would be detrimental to training health professionals. The vast majority of today’s pharmacopeia is derived from the R&D efforts of the modern pharmaceutical industry; effective treatments derived from traditional medicine are rare, especially in the era of bio- and immunotherapies. For example, of the over 150 anti-cancer drugs available today, only three are of natural origin (trabectedin, taxanes, and vinca-alkaloids).

How science loses credibility without even trying

• When scientific institutions issue political position statements and adopt identity-based policies, they alienate and lose the trust of large dissenting segments of the public.

• When prominent scientific journals promote these ideologies through editorials and perspective pieces, they magnify the alienation.

• these manifestos undermine the credibility of science as an objective, disinterested, and truth-seeking enterprise.

• Below, we highlight selected examples of such publications, grouped according to recurring themes. Common among them is revolutionary destructivism, which calls for the established structures and practices of science to be replaced by CSJ-based practices. Words like “excellence,” “impact,” or “quality” rarely appear, or appear only to be “problematized” (which, according CSJ, can be done to anything4,6). Instead, we see ample mention of “white supremacy,” “discrimination,” “harassment,” “race,” “gender,” “violence,” “intersectionality,” and “marginalization,” typically without citation to supporting evidence, an egregious failure for journals purporting to be about science.

  • Theme 1: Science is white and colonial

    • The apex journal Nature has created a “Decolonizing Science Toolkit,”89 which includes articles such as “Institutions Must Acknowledge the Racist Roots in Science,”90 “Decolonization Should Extend to Collaborations,” “Authorship and Co-Creation of Knowledge,”91 and “Seeding an Anti-Racist Culture at Scotland’s Botanical Gardens.

    • An article published in Nature attempting to justify the “decolonization of science” in South Africa states: “Decolonization is a movement to eliminate ... the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education … dismantling the hegemony of European values and making way for the local philosophy and traditions that colonists had cast aside.”38 One might think, the article would identify how, for example, Newtonian physics or Darwin’s biology went wrong and the errors were fixed by indigenous knowledge. It does nothing of the kind.

  • Theme 2: Science is racist

    • Learned societies and institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences (NAS),94 the National Academy of Engineering,95 the National Academy of Medicine,96 and the National Institutes of Health,73 have issued statements asserting, without evidence, the existence of systemic racism among their ranks and pledging to combat it.

    • A Nature editorial in 2021 reaffirms this narrative: “Racism in science is endemic because the systems that produce and teach scientific knowledge have marginalized and ill-treated people of other skin colors and under-represented groups for centuries”; organizations “must ensure that anti-racism is embedded in their ... objectives and that such work wins recognition and promotion”

    • As is typical when viewed through the lens of Critical Theory, these assertions were not buttressed by actual evidence of systemic racism—the existence of quantitative disparities was the only evidence required. This may be valid in a dogmatic ideological framework that attributes all inequality to “isms.” But from a scientific perspective, assertions require evidence and correlation does not imply causation. In fact, the assertion that all inequality in the present is determined by discrimination in the present is readily refuted by evidence. For example, Asian Americans earn more advanced degrees and have higher incomes than do white Americans. The notion that all inequality reflects systemic racism leads to the absurd conclusion that U.S. is an Asian supremacy.

      • I note here that a common attempt to dismiss this analysis is that immigration practices selected for affluent professionals. For example, Moin Syed, at the prestigious psychology department of the University of Minnesota, wrote: “From the systemic framework, one would put that observation in context and highlight how it was racist U.S. immigration policies that led to selective immigration from some Asian countries that held preference for those with high education, high potential, and sufficient resources to ensure success.” Although this probably overstates the selectivity of US immigration policies in the last 30 years, let’s put that aside. It is one vast irrelevancy. A White Supremacy would not permit Asian immigrants, even highly selected ones, the type of opportunities to exceed White Americans in education and income. It would have oppressed them into submission and low status.

    • The proposed solutions—to a problem that has not been shown to exist—endanger the integrity of the scientific enterprise. Scientific positions, grants, and article acceptances should be awarded on the basis of their quality rather than treated as commodities to be distributed based on identity categories. The telos of science is the search for provisional truth and the production of knowledge, not the redistribution of rewards to achieve activists’ visions of equity or reparative justice.

  • Theme 3: Merit-based policies should be replaced by identity-based policies

    • Many scientific societies now encourage or require identity-based quotas for speakers and award recipients.

    • The secretary of the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] revealed how this will operate: “[W]e assign slots [to different fields] based on the diversity of the lists of nominees that get forwarded” and “If they used [their slots] to pick a bunch of white guys from Harvard, they get penalized.”

    • It is also offensive to know that one's research was selected, not strictly for its merit, but at least partly due to one's ethnicity or gender. This is “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”—the creation of different standards based on the perceived or real historical oppression of some individuals.

    • The failure of affirmative action in the U.S. is well documented; despite being in place for more than half a century in U.S. colleges, race-conscious admissions have not led to proportional representation in STEMM.52 The total number of Black students matriculating in U.S. medical schools has not changed in over three decades.

    • When confounding factors are controlled, evidence of gender bias in STEM all but vanishes.

    • In a similar vein, institutions justify mandatory DEI training by alleged implicit biases, based mostly on the implicit association test (IAT), which is riddled with conceptual, theoretical, empirical, statistical, and methodological limitations, weaknesses, and artifacts.136 Indeed, there is no evidence that receiving implicit bias training or reducing implicit bias as measured by the IAT reduces discriminatory behavior.

    • In hiring at many universities, faculty applicants are now required to write DEI statements. In recent faculty searches in the life sciences at UC Berkeley, three-quarters of the candidates were eliminated solely on the basis on their DEI statements.47 Putting aside separate objections that the use of DEI statements to screen applicants constitutes a political litmus test and a form of (possibly illegal) compelled speech, by reducing the viable applicant pool, it likely undermines the quality of science.

    • DEI statements are often expected to embrace CSJ; statements that express support for the ideals of liberal social justice, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society, are rejected. As UC Berkeley’s sample rubric for evaluating diversity statements states, candidates who intend to treat “all students the same regardless of their background” will be given the lowest score.

    • In 2021, job advertisements for STEMM faculty often devote more space to DEI requirements than to actual technical qualifications. As McWhorter notes, job advertisements for physicists now sound like advertisements for social workers or anthropologists.

The way forward

• For science to succeed, it must strive for the non-ideological pursuit of objective truth. Scientists should feel free to pursue political projects in the public sphere as private citizens, but not to inject their personal politics and biases into the scientific endeavor.

• Maintaining institutional neutrality is also essential for cultivating public trust in science. The rush to create systems institutionalizing racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in college admissions and hiring will further corrode public trust in academia and science (e.g., surveys from the U.S. show that most Americans, including most Americans of color, reject such preferences.

• Although no system is guaranteed to eliminate all biases, merit-based systems are the best tool to mitigate it. Moreover, they promote social cohesion because they can be observed to maximize fairness.

• Admittedly, meritocracy is imperfect. The best and brightest do not always win. But the idea that meritocracy is nothing but a myth is demonstrably false, indeed absurd. Were it but a myth, college admissions and hiring could be conducted without regard to applicants’ qualifications, and students or employees could be selected at random.

  • How do we begin the process of depoliticizing science and strengthening merit-based practices? We offer six concrete suggestions:

  • Insist that government funding for research be distributed solely on the basis of merit.

  • Ensure that academic departments and conferences select speakers based on scientific, rather than ideological, considerations.

  • Ensure that admissions, hiring, and promotion are merit-based and free from ideological tests.

  • Publish and retract scientific papers on the basis of scientific, not ideological, arguments or due to public pressure.

  • Require that universities enforce policies protecting academic freedom and freedom of expression, according to best practices promulgated by non-partisan free speech and academic freedom organizations, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

  • Insist that university departments and professional societies refrain from issuing statements on social and political issues not relevant to their functioning, as recommended in the University of Chicago's Kalven Report.

Conclusion

• Imbuing science with ideology harms the scientific enterprise and leads to a loss of public trust. If we continue to undermine merit, our universities will become institutions of mediocrity, rather than places of creativity and accomplishment, leading to the loss of the competitive edge in technology.

• Scientists must start standing up for the integrity of their fields despite the risk of bullying and verbal attacks

• donors and funders should condition their support on non-partisan and rational scientific pursuit.

• Science as a free pursuit of knowledge untainted by ideological orthodoxies maximally enhances the public good.

I can’t resist presenting the entire Afterword.

Afterword

• Perhaps the grandest irony of them all, and the saddest commentary on the state of academia, is that this article, defending merit, could only be published in a journal devoted to airing “controversial” ideas. As we were finalizing the manuscript for publication, the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House released a 14 page long vision statement outlining the priorities for the U.S. STEMM ecosystem. The word “merit” appears nowhere in the document.

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