THE TIGHTEST PRIORS DESERVE THE STRICTEST SCRUTINY.

In yesterday's bill of particulars against West Virginia University, I saved their greatest failure for last.

West Virginia, by attaching that loyalty oath to its appointment letters, has forfeited its claim to be a university, whether there is a doctoral program in mathematics or a chance to read War and Peace in the original Russian, or not.

Let me conclude by noting that the forfeiture of that claim is not a theoretical concern alone.

The warning signs of what we will contemplate today were there, if you knew where to look.  "The University of California system is committing intellectual suicide in the name of inclusion." To be specific, "Peer review isn't all it's cracked up to be.  If authors have to tweak their submissions so as to tick the boxes the politically reliable reviewers will insist on, it will only get worse."  That noted, researchers still have to do the work properly if they hope to get published.

Consider the lament of former academician Patrick Brown,  who asserts the box-ticking is there, and not in a good way.  "I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work."  That confession confirms Hot Air's Ed "Captain Ed" Morrissey's priors, and he's all over it.

Feeding the narrative? Check. Editorial bias? Check. Top-down political influence on science? Double check. Bloated Academia competing too hard for too few dollars and openings? Check, at least to a degree.

Ironically, that makes the Academia-Media nexus the least interesting part of Brown’s essay, but it’s still plenty interesting — and important, too.

It's possible that the Captain's assessment is correct.

Brown goes into valuable detail and outlines the full scope of the problem, which ties into the glut of PhDs and impact of that competition in both publication and employment in Academia. One notable point: With six times as many doctorates being produced than 50 years ago, the pressure is much greater now for unemployed PhDs to suck up to both the media and academic establishments to have even a hope of gainful employment after graduation. Even if the overall point doesn’t surprise us, Brown delivers a lot of value in explaining the process as well as the ramifications of each step.

It's possible also that he has diagnosed one way in which taking that pledge to work for some nebulous greater good goes wrong.

We certainly don’t hear about increasing crop yields, although that would be precisely what one might expect from slightly increased CO2 in the atmosphere and longer growing seasons. No one discusses declining heat deaths either, nor the fact that deaths from cold weather are a much greater statistical threat to humans than heat.

As Brown points out, the establishments in media, Academia, and politics work hard to quash mentions of those issues and outcomes. They want to sell hysteria as a means to grab power. To allow those discussions at high-profile publications would require scientists and policymakers to put aside Chicken Littleism and deal in practical solutions and innovation rather than the neo-paganism that has gripped elite circles. Instead, they want to demand sacrifices to Mother Gaia for our industrial sins and punish the heretics and apostates.

On the other hand, perhaps former academician Brown is saying more about researchers either practicing "normal science" in the Kuhnian sense, or cutting corners.

I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

That might be, although grousing about academic journals being captured by specific departments or specific schools of thought antedates the Long March through the Institutions.  Everybody in research understands there is an element of luck in getting a paper published at a journal, and it's a form of release to grouse about how The American Economic Review as edited by George Borts was different from what it became when George Clower became editor; or how the findings of mediocre Harvard dissertations made The Quarterly Journal of Economics, while mediocre University of Chicago dissertations showed up in Journal of Political Economy.  And yes, those three journals are major gatekeepers for aspiring economists.  I would not be surprised to see the same dynamic at work in any other discipline.

It starts with the fact that a researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades.

But as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years—there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s—it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

If I recall correctly, there's less value in replicating existing work or confirming widely accepted stylized facts.  There's a lot of p-hacking to come up with "contributions to the literature" that produce Minimal Publishable Units, and then there's that Quarterly Journal of Economics effect, if it exists, at work.

I suspect, though, that coming up with a suitably novel interpretation of existing stylized facts, or a well-reasoned challenge to them, remains a "contribution to the literature."  To land a paper that challenges existing priors requires careful work.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely.

I'm skeptical.  A simple confirmation of existing research with more recent data strikes me as a Minimal Publishable Unit for an archival journal, not necessarily the best use of space in Nature; whilst adding additional explanatory variables to capture those other effects might take more time off the tenure clock, and be hard to impound in ceteris paribus in any event.  Those considerations might be on the minds of the editors and the referees.

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions.

I'm not persuaded.  It is one thing to note that climate change manifests itself in heat-related deaths and crop damage; it is yet another, and more difficult, thing to assess the combined gains and losses from climate change, anthropogenic or not, and the sorts of betterments that reduce heat-related deaths and improve crop yields.  It's another thing to sell that to a top journal.

I wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets. To put it another way, I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and reviewers of the journals I was targeting.

I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. Now, as a member of a private nonprofit research center, The Breakthrough Institute, I feel much less pressure to mold my research to the preferences of prominent journal editors and the rest of the field.

Color me skeptical.  The paper in the "less prestigious outlet" is "Approximate calculations of the net economic impact of global warming mitigation targets under heightened damage estimates."  The abstract opens, "Efforts to mitigate global warming are often justified through calculations of the economic damages that may occur absent mitigation. The earliest such damage estimates were speculative mathematical representations, but some more recent studies provide empirical estimates of damages on economic growth that accumulate over time and result in larger damages than those estimated previously."  The conclusion opens,

The results of this study come with a number of important caveats. First, we use a highly-idealized schematic model of the coupled global climate-economic system (DICE). This simplicity allows us to make transparent calculations but prevents us from explicitly simulating features of the system that may turn out to be of great importance. This applies to all modules of the DICE model, but it is particularly relevant to the estimation of mitigation costs which we weigh against climate damages in our benefit-cost analyses. Although DICE’s mitigation cost calculations produce global values consistent with those produced from processed-based IAMs (Fig 7), they do not explicitly represent individual energy technologies, individual geographical regions, energy systems’ inertia, cost declines via learning-by-doing, induced technological change, etc.

A conclusion that acknowledges all manner of limitations of those "highly-idealized" schematic models doesn't have the bite of "The planets orbit the sun" or "There is no ether wind" let alone "Economic agents can figure out what fiscal policy will be and adapt to counteract it."  I look at the list of additional, omitted, confounding factors noted in the closing sentence of that paragraph and wonder whether any sort of statistical analysis or simulation can even get close.  I remind you, dear reader, that a paper challenging an existing paradigm has to be tightly argued, and it might have to be more convincing than the average Minimal Publishable Unit.

The simpler explanation might be that the accepted Nature article was more tightly framed than the more ambitious paper Nature turned down whilst in PLOS One accepted it.