Rick Hess, self-described “as one of the nation’s most influential thinkers on K-12 and higher ed,” recently wrote a post claiming that “a huge chunk of scholarly research is a pointless exercise pursued by hobbyists who like the perks.” It was quoted with endorsement from Bryan Caplan:

“I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with studying frivolous questions. I am suggesting that doing so should be a private activity for hobbyists, dilettantes, or employees of private enterprises—not a time-consuming task for educators at publicly subsidized institutions.”

These are smart guys whose political biases are blinding them to the most basic axiom of scholarship: knowledge is hard. I’m going to show that here.

Hess attacks the social sciences, which have been rocked in recent years by a couple of factors: (1) prominent fraud scandals and (2) methodological failures. Let’s take a look.

Fraud

Obviously fraud is bad and I’m against it. While not excusing the perpetrators, it’s worth asking why such intelligent and well-placed people would do it. I think it is this. Imagine you’re a researcher at a place like Harvard. Your employer expects you to be a world-beating genius all of the time, and no matter what you achieve, it will be met with “that’s nice, but what are you working on now?” Plus you’re running a large lab that’s mostly if not completely supported by grants. People’s livelihoods directly depend on your ability to get big grants, publish a ton of articles, and make substantive discoveries. On top of that, every day you are invited to high-profile conferences to show off your latest brilliant ideas. Then there’s your upcoming TED Talk and popular book roll-out.

That’s a lot of pressure. So you start to think that maybe cutting a few corners would be OK. Then a few more…

Changing the incentive structures would help with the cheating problem is all I’m saying. But concluding that social science is a scam because some people are fraudsters and fake their data is like concluding that the entire idea of an economic market is a failure because some people are thieves and just steal the money.

Methodology

Social scientists figured out on their own that a lot of their research involved p-hacking, positive-result publication bias, failures to replicate, and unregistered research hypotheses. They decided that’s all unacceptable, so now researchers are looking for ways to overcome these problems. This is exactly how science is supposed to work: the discovery of methodological weaknesses followed by finding ways to fix them. Not a bunch of chicken-littles running around shouting, “it’s all a scam! Aaaaah!”

Prior to the 20th century medical research was mostly garbage. That’s why serious, dedicated researchers wound up publishing all kinds of wild results. For example (following the publication of Samuel Tissot’s Onania in 1700), masturbation was considered a dread disease, with symptoms like dyspepsia, constrictions of the urethra, epilepsy, blindness, vertigo, loss of hearing, headache, impotency, loss of memory, rickets, acne, moroseness and anger, leucorrhea in women, chronic catarrhal conjunctivitis, nymphomania, and insanity (including hereditary insanity).1

It wasn’t until the 1940s that double-blind studies were developed, first for the streptomycin trial for tuberculosis. These turned out to be the gold standard, which meant all of those old 19th century findings had to be trashed and reinvestigated. As a result, people have now concluded that

Furthermore, it’s not just medical research or the social sciences that have faced real methodological challenges. All fields have. Here’s neuroscientist Chenchen Li explaining how his field recently wasted a billion euros pursuing the idea that brains can be reverse-engineered in a computer. He claims that neuroscientists can’t even build an algorithm that works like the massively-studied nematode c. elegans (a millimeter-long worm with 302 neurons). Li is quite persuasive that his field’s main approach to these problems, viz. treating nervous systems like circuits, is doomed.

Maybe Hess and Caplan think that neuroscience too is best pursued by amateurs and dilettantes.

Frivolous research

OK, fine, but surely frivolous research doesn’t merit any public support, right? Get a real job (maybe become a stonemason, or work at the East India Company, or the patent office in Bern) and do it as a hobby. Just tell me: who will decide what is frivolous? The lidless eye wreathed in flame glowering out of the White House? Rick Hess? Bryan Caplan?

Consider Georg Cantor. In the 19th century Cantor proved that there are different cardinalities of infinity, that is, that some infinitely large sets are bigger than other infinitely large sets. There are more real numbers than integers, for example. This was a huge discovery that, among other things, solved the problem of squares which Galileo first raised in Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638). It also helped lay the foundations of set theory.

Naturally, everyone thought it was stupid. OK, not everyone, but Cantor’s old teacher Leopold Kronecker said Cantor was a “corrupter of youth” and his ideas about infinity were meaningless. He went on to stop Cantor from getting a better job and hindered his professional publications. Wittgenstein thought that Cantor’s famous diagonal argument didn’t prove anything except a confusion in our way of talking. Jesuits complained that infinity was a property of God alone and claiming that humans could explain it came close to blasphemy. Neo-Kantians thought transfinite sets might violate the limits of human knowledge.

Cantor was depressed, despondent, and nearly suicidal as a result of this reception. Note that he was a Professor at the University of Halle, a public research university funded by the German government, for his entire career.

Or how about Paul Dirac.2 Schrödinger’s equation described the wave function of a quantum-mechanical system, but it didn’t incorporate relativity theory. That was needed because of particles (electrons, say) moving at near light speed. In 1928 Dirac came up with the relativistic wave equation for the electron. Awesome, right? Dirac’s equation was E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4. Let the momentum (p) go to zero and then E^2 is proportional to m^2 (because c = the speed of light which is a constant). That means when we solve for the energy E, there is both a positive and a negative solution.

However, if there are negative energy states, then it looks like an electron could just fall endlessly into lower energy states, radiating more and more energy without bound as it goes. Well, that’s not happening. So what gives? Dirac proposed the “Dirac Sea,” namely that all negative energy states are already filled with antimatter particles, so by the Pauli Exclusion Principle there would be nowhere for decaying electrons to go.

Once again, everybody thought this was stupid. Wolfgang Pauli said it was mathematically inconsistent and physically meaningless. Neils Bohr thought the Dirac Sea was just as bad as the luminiferous ether, which Einstein had just disposed of. Hermann Weyl loved the equation, but thought antimatter a desperate remedy to patch over an incompleteness in the theory. Werner Heisenberg wrote in a letter that “the saddest chapter of modern physics is and remains the Dirac theory.”

In 1932 the positron (the antimatter version of an electron) was discovered in cosmic rays. In 1933 Dirac won the Nobel Prize in Physics. When Dirac came up with his big idea, he was a research fellow at Cambridge, his work funded by a royal charity. The theoretical prediction and mathematical explanation of antimatter wasn’t due to market forces or business decisions.

I’m also pretty tired of the moral panic that someone, somewhere might be spending their tax dollars on something they don’t like. Of course that’s happening! That’s literally how it works! One person wants their taxes to support scholarship, another wants them to support nameless masked men with guns grabbing people off the streets. Then we have elections and the majority decides how the tax money gets directed. That’s the theory anyway. But nobody gets everything they want, and there will always be money spent on things you think are bad. Again, a feature, not a bug. Plus, as I argued before, contrary to popular opinion there is no such thing as government waste.

Also, let’s not get too worked up about chump change. Maybe you think the stuff I research is pointless. Well, each taxpayer in my state annually contributes 1/3 of a penny to my salary, so possibly that is not worth the electrons to write a screed of complaint.

There’s plenty of popular lines of investigation in philosophy I think are haring in the wrong direction, for example, standpoint theory. Standpoint theory is either (1) the anodyne observation that one’s knowledge is often the result of one’s own situation and experiences, or (2) warmed-over relativism, but this time by feminists.3 Hey, maybe I’m wrong. I’m not the philosopher king who gets to declare and enforce my judgments about what is frivolous. No one should be.

A genuine research community finds the frauds and kicks them out of the club. It debates its own methodology and revises it when it decides things aren’t working well. This is how things properly function. Remember, Sturgeon’s Law famously says that 90% of everything is crap, so let’s not clutch our pearls when only 10% of our research output is non-crap. Knowledge is hard, but even seemingly frivolous research can pay off big.