Fred Schindler
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We’ve heard the phrases “trust the science” and “believe the science” time and again over the past few years. I don’t think they are helpful messages. We should understand the data and what it indicates to us. We should focus on our knowledge and how best to apply it. Using the term science adds an abstraction. Unfortunately, for many, people there is a mystique to science.
I looked up the definition of science in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to check if the word is being used properly. Here’s what I found: “1 a: Possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding” [1]. By this definition, “trust the science” is a correct usage of the word and fits the intent. There are, of course, multiple definitions. “1 b: Knowledge possessed or attained through study or practice” [1]. This is closer to what I always thought of as science. It describes the process by which we develop knowledge. With this definition, “trust the science” means trust the process, which is also an appropriate usage of the word. That is a better message, but that subtlety is lost, and it’s not what most people intend. So, I don’t think the message is a service to the general community. Our knowledge may be developed by scientists, but the goal should be for it to be understood by all.
I’m also troubled by the word “believe.” Belief is for something that can’t be demonstrated. People believe in astrology. Horoscopes are vaguely worded so that they seem to have value. I’ve never seen a definitive horoscope—next Tuesday, a tree will fall on your car at 10:32:19 a.m. on Elm Street.
Several years ago, my mother gave me her cousin’s divining rod, also known as a dousing rod. That cousin believed that there are fields in the Earth and the diving rod could sense them. These fields are deflected by underground pools of water, so the divining rod can indicate where a well should be dug. He also believed that it was ill advised to sleep at the convergence of these fields. You can read more about these notions by Googling “Hartmann and Curry lines.” My mother’s cousin was Manfred Curry. I’ve held his divining rod. I don’t believe that it works. What if I believed in it, would it work then? It’s a gateway to pseudoscience.
There is a similar pseudoscience involving spinning fields. Here, too, a type of divining rod is used to detect the fields. The dietary supplement Laminine is claimed to carry these fields. If you Google “Laminine spinning field,” you will find a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXWqwzYdgmQ). It shows the divining rod start to spin once Laminine capsules are placed under it. But I question why the rod must be held in someone’s hand. Certainly, it could be mounted in such a way that it could spin freely. But I suspect that then it would no longer detect these fields.
Good science uses methods that remove bias so that we can collect meaningful data. Removing the human hand avoids a potential source of bias. Good science also separates anecdote from understanding via controlled studies. I once caught a cold shortly after putting on green socks. I might have suspected that the green socks caused the cold. Was it those specific socks, or are all green socks inherently dangerous? We can come up with some experiments to answer these questions. Double-blind studies are a method science uses to answer these questions. What if we don’t know that the socks are green?
Someone with COVID took hydroxychloroquine and got better. Many then wondered if this was an effective treatment. Well-designed clinical studies showed that it was not effective. Science didn’t prove hydroxychloroquine was ineffective; unbiased clinical trials did.
I was quite ill with COVID during the Delta variant surge, and I received an antibody infusion. The next day, I felt much better. Someone asked me how well the antibody infusion worked. How could I know? I might have improved as quickly without the infusion. But clinical trials showed that it was an effective treatment—patients who received it fared better than those who didn’t. It seems likely I benefited, and I was happy to have received the treatment.
We’ve heard of athletes and celebrities who weren’t willing to accept “the science,” especially the controlled studies of the COVID vaccines, even though they were reviewed by clinical experts. Instead, they claimed they would do their own research. What research did they have in mind? I doubt they were planning to conduct their own double-blind controlled experiments. More likely, they searched the Internet, or even better, discussions on Facebook, a platform that seems to legitimize the most absurd notions. If they were ambitious, they may have sought out academic articles. They might have found literature on preprint servers such as arXiv that offer content prior to any peer review. At best, such content is moderated. Or maybe they even looked for articles in journals, but which ones? There are plenty of legitimate-sounding online journals that will publish seemingly anything. Most claim they conduct peer reviews.
In a large part, we have the open science movement to thank for the proliferation of online journals. In spirit, the notion that all research work should be available for all to consume is noble. But in practice, it turns the system that developed over centuries to filter out flawed work on its head. It was never a perfect system, but this isn’t making it better. The drive for open access publishing requires the author to pay a fee for an article to be published—an article processing charge (APC). Publishing has a cost, and if subscription income isn’t available, the cost needs to be borne by the author via an APC.
Open access creates an incentive for publishers to accept articles. The more articles a publisher accepts, the larger its income. Predatory publishers have proliferated to exploit the open access movement and to collect fees for publishing articles in their online journals. Well-established publishers with a reputation for high quality will inevitably be tempted, too. We’ve already seen some journals with excellent reputations create specialized spin-offs to collect articles in adjacent areas.
For many years, we have provided open access publishing to our authors via hybrid journals—where some articles are available only via subscription, and others are available to all via open access. IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques is an example of this. It’s important to understand the process. The editors of the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques do not ask the authors if they require open access publishing until after the article is accepted. This avoids the incentive to accept an article. Purely open access journals, which are being mandated by the open access movement, do have an incentive to accept articles. I have confidence that IEEE won’t compromise its standards. But I’m not confident that all other publishers will avoid temptation.
Science evolves. Several months into the pandemic, we learned that COVID’s transmission is primarily airborne. Meticulously cleaning surfaces was at first considered a key strategy for reducing the spread of the virus. Now, we know that it isn’t. We still have hand sanitizer stations in public places and organizations boasting of their efforts to periodically clean surfaces. (This seems performative, but I can’t find fault. It may not help reduce the spread of COVID, but it will reduce the spread of other infections.) Hypotheses are replaced with new ones that better explain what we observe. Our understanding of phenomena improves as we collect more and better data and gain new insights. Our knowledge evolves, and how it evolves needs to be conveyed clearly and effectively. Otherwise, it might all seem arbitrary. That means communicating what the data show and that good science is as much a process as the knowledge it generates.
[1] P. B. Gove, Ed., Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Springfield, MA, USA: Merriam-Webster, 1986.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2022.3220312