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If you enumerated the 100 greatest ever scientific minds, Aristotle (384-322 BC) would be on your list. Possibly, he could make the top 25. For millennia, his genius was practically worshipped. Ironically, that renown probably held science back for centuries.
Aristotle taught that the speed of a falling object is directly proportional to its weight. He taught that celestial motion is always circular. He taught that the world was earth centric. All three concepts were wrong, but it was unacceptable to challenge Aristotle. For two millennia his theories held sway.
It would take Nicolaus Copernicus (1493-1543) to establish that the planets were heliocentric. It would take the experiments of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to show that the speed of a falling object was independent of its weight. It would take no less than Isaac Newton (1643-1727) to invent calculus and show that the orbits of the planets were not circles, but ellipses. If Aristotle had been a lesser figure, his theories would have toppled earlier. As it was, Aristotelian bias stretched through centuries.
Science and scientists often are biased and the net result is that innovation and creativity are stymied.
One example is DOS, the Disk Operating System introduced by Bill Gates. The early dominance and monopoly of DOS retarded computer operating systems by at least a decade. I do not denigrate the invention of DOS, I simply maintain that its tyrannical dominance hindered what would have been more rapid and creative development.
Cold Fusion is the name given to a (hypothetically existing) low energy nuclear reaction. In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann, at that time widely respected electrochemists, announced that they had discovered Cold Fusion. One or two labs quickly replicated their results. Then, no lab could replicate their results. Now, of course, it is almost universally accepted that the Cold Fusion verifications were bogus. However, the announcement by Pons and Fleishmann pushed some of the labs to actually “replicate” the results (which did not actually happen). Controversy over the Cold Fusion results persist.
Science caters and leans to established authorities, sometimes without sufficient examination.
Scientific bias pervades areas that are not even science. For example, in his popular book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, an icon of gravitational physics, spends an inordinate portion of the book denying the existence of God. (Why the passion to insist that atheism and science are brothers?) Hawking, and many other physicists, seek to ensure that physics is properly biased against any notion of God. I suspect this bias to be so strong that if an asteroid hit the earth labeled “Made by God in Heaven,” Hawking would champion the search for extraterrestrial beings who, obviously, are attempting to beguile us
Statistics from our most prestigious drug laboratories show that 67% of the results published in national, refereed journals cannot be duplicated or verified. The Wall Street Journal summarized these findings. As an example, Amgen, Inc. had 24 researchers working for six months to try to duplicate the findings of a Boston academic group. It was a waste of time and money. The message is clear. Established scientists (and some non-established ones) create immense bias.
Why is there an insidious and pervasive movement to bias science? In a field that supposedly touts openness, why is it so closed? What causes this bias?
The first reason is a valid one. If you open the door to every crazy notion someone dreams up, you spend all your time chasing aliens or ghosts or whatever wild scheme anyone can fathom.
The second reason is not as sound. Great scientists take a position, often stubbornly, and thereby stymie creative thinking and opposing ideas. Niels Bohr (1885–1962) was the physics poster child at this. Bohr was an icon who managed to oppose Albert Einstein on the theory of the light being a quanta, denounce Erwin Schrodinger for his quantum approach using the Hamiltonian, discourage Paul Dirac’s work on the relativistic quantum theory, oppose Wolfgang Pauli’s prediction of the neutrino, and denigrate Richard Feynman’s approach to quantum electrodynamics. The point is not that he was wrong five out of five times but that he used his elevated position to block the view of others.
The third reason for bias is that researchers like to get positive results. It creates Ph.D. dissertations and gets them out of graduate school and into a job. Favorable discoveries are far superior to status quo. To my knowledge, only Albert Michelson and Edward Morley received a Nobel prize for finding nothing.
The fourth reason is that research most often is funded by organizations that gain from Result A and do not gain from Result B. Whatever your position on the cause of global warming, the companies that fund the research stand to gain personally, politically, or economically from favorable results. This may or may not produce incorrect data, but it most assuredly generates bias.
Academic research is almost never doubly blind. Without a doubly blind experiment only the very best of researchers can refrain from unintended bias.
Spurious data often are deleted for the obvious reason that they do not agree with the majority of the data. This is self-defeating. It extends the bias. The correct approach is to identify and quantify the reason for the outliers.
The fifth reason is if you know the answer, (or at least what you think is the answer) you tend to get that answer. I balance my checkbook that way. I add it up twice. If I get the same answer twice, I quit. I never consider that I may have made the same mistake twice (until I get a note back from the bank).
High school physics students get an A+ for bias. An example is a typical physics lab experiment measuring the intensity of light as a function of distance. Now, only about 10% of the class remembers from my lectures that light intensity dissipates in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. After the laboratory is complete and everyone has their data, it takes about eight minutes before this insight “filters” around the room and all the students know that the data should fit an inverse square law. Now, in any given class, there will always be at least one group of students that does not even measure the right things. For example, they do not put the sensor directly in the line of the beam and get who-knows-what for the intensity. Not to worry. I rest soundly at night knowing that each lab report will show the data “perfectly” obeying the inverse square law.
Beware of bias.
If you want to be the Persuasive Wizard, you must recognize and eliminate bias in every aspect of your work. Ensure that you, yourself, do not establish biases and misdirect your team. Loosen the reins. Accept and pursue some ideas you do not totally believe it. Vice versa, do not let your team force biases on you. Know when to quit and move on. Thou Shalt Not Beat Dead Horses. Make decisions.
Understanding and reducing bias is a key ingredient of the Persuasive Wizard.