Speaker 1:
This is, I think, one of the most important panels because we kind of know the humanities are in trouble. The hard sciences, as we heard yesterday, are in not so much trouble for the actual science. Laser spectroscopy doesn’t get canceled. Here we have issues where there’s real hard science and also real politics and real questions about one’s freedom and ability to do research that leads one, honestly, into ways that counter important narratives. Our panelists have the advantage of having experienced some of that, having watched some of that, and in most cases, having been right after the fact for which I congratulate them all, or at least in my opinion. Anyway, let’s go. I thought we would do climate first, so maybe I’ll start with Bjorn, and then we’ll go on to Noah if he shows up. Ah, hello.
Noah:
[inaudible 00:01:03]
Speaker 1:
Well, I didn’t find you successfully, which is my fault. Welcome, Noah. We’ll go Bjorn, Noah, and then we’ll go on to medicine with Jay and John, if that’s okay with everyone. Go for it.
Bjorn:
All right. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me and everyone else to this conference. Listening to all you guys yesterday made me realize, I left academia 17 years ago, so I run a think tank called The Copenhagen Consensus, where we do cost benefit analysis across a wide range of areas, and I got to say your conference had made me think I want to get back into academia. I had my own run in with the thought police back in 2003, where I was convicted by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, and that’s as Orwellian as it sounds. I was laid and cleared because it turns out that, according to Danish law, you can’t actually make an official governmental decision without having a good cause, and they didn’t. They literally just wrote an op-ed essentially of why I did bad stuff, and therefore should be convicted, but I think that was certainly my experience with running with us.
I think it’s important that we actually have a good conversation about climate. I think, and I’m very excited to also hear what your thoughts are on this, but my sense is, and I want to spend most of the time not talking about the thought police part of it, but what we’re not talking about in climate and I think also in a lot of other areas because it doesn’t give convenient results. I want to talk about how we have very little sense of the impacts, the actual effectiveness of climate policy, how we best fix some problems, what are the cost of climate policies, and also what are the cost benefit of climate policies, which I think is the way we should be thinking about a lot of different things, not just climate. Just to give a little bit on each one of these, so on the impacts, there’ll be a copy out in front. I have an op-ed and Wall Street Journal today where I go through… You might not have seen this, but it was very widely published around the world.
The Lancet Journal came out and told us that, over the last 17 years, there’s become 68% more heat deaths because of temperature rises among old people. That certainly sounds really, really dangerous now. Just less than two decades and we’re already up two-thirds. What they forget to tell you is that there’s 60% more old people in the world, which is just… What? Are you serious? Is this really how you do science? The actual increase is 5%, which is not nothing and certainly something we should know. If you translate into actual numbers, that’s 17,000 more people that die every year. We should certainly know that that is a problem with global warming. On the other hand, of course, we should also recognize it because of almost everywhere, many, many more people die from cold. About seven to nine times more people die from cold almost everywhere in the world, and that’s gone down over the last 17 years, same time period according to the Global Burden of Disease by about 26%.
Because it’s a much larger number, that actually means that every year now about 524,000 people don’t die from cold. It seems to me that we’re not well-informed if we’re being told it’s 68% when it’s actually five, and that turns out to be 17,000 more people that die, but we’re not being told that, “Oh, by the way, 524,000 people don’t die because of increasing temperatures.” Again, this is not a conversation about whether global warming is a problem. It is overall a problem, but we are not being well-informed about these things. We have no sense of the impact of climate policy. People will tell you that these have huge impacts. You heard about the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the biggest thing the US has ever done. I actually ran that with the Biden administration’s estimates of how much this is going to impact. If you have very generous assumptions that after the money runs out, we’ll keep cutting for the rest of the century, the reduction in temperature will be upwards of, sorry, 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, so we’ll just not be able to measure it.
If we stop reducing when we have run out of money by early 2030s, it’ll be so small you can’t actually see. Shelling used to say, “You really need a very fine pencil in order to be able to show this, but you couldn’t do it with any kind of fine pencil.” It’s less than 110,000 of a degree Fahrenheit in differences, and we need to know these kinds of things. Likewise, when we talk about heat deaths, for instance, if you think back in 2003 in France, there’s probably… What was it? 20,000 or more people that died from a huge heat wave in France, and a lot of people said, “So we need to do climate policy.” My thinking is to say, “Well, if you do that, what that means is that you will make sure that temperatures keep increasing, but slightly less,” so you’re going to kill way more people by the end of the century in Paris, France, but slightly less, many more people by the end of the century. Surely, that’s not the best thing we could do.
We could actually just make sure that old people in Paris, France don’t sit alone, get water, and get air conditioning. We know how to fix these things. Again, it’s not to say that we’re not a smart civilization, we can’t do both, and we can actually be thinking about both these things, but obviously, this is a much more effective policy. If you think about polar bears, for instance, actually polar bear populations have been increasing quite dramatically over the last 50 years mainly because we’ve curtailed hunting, so we’ve probably never have many certainly over the last 50 years as we have now about 26,000 individuals of polar bears, but people are still worried about polar bears and saying, “We should cut carbon emissions in order to save polar bears.” If you look at it, you can save a fraction of a polar bear every year with realistic climate policies.
I’m just sort of thinking, “Why are we talking about this when every year we still shoot about 950 polar bears?” I don’t know if we want to save polar bears. Maybe we should stop shooting them first. Again, the point here is not to be flippant, but it’s simply about getting a sense of priority. I think the reason and why this fits into this conference conversation is that if this was a normal policy question, we would have much more of these kinds of conversations. We’d be saying, “Look, it’s a problem with the polar bears. How do we fix it?”, and it wouldn’t be, but the answer has to be cut carbon emissions and put up solar panels. The answer shouldn’t be given, and beforehand, and I feel like it very often is. When people are talking about net-zero, there’s very little conversation about what’s the cost of net-zero. McKinsey estimates in the order of almost 6% or about six trillion dollars per year, that’s about two-thirds of the global tax intake that we should be spending the next 30 years every year.
That’s just implausible by any reasonable estimate, yet we continue to talk about it as if it’s going to happen. I think, again, we are badly informed if we don’t have this discussion about saying, look, we can’t actually afford all these wonderful policies that everybody are talking. Well, they’re not wonderful, but all these amazing policies that people are talking about. We need to have a discussion about what’s realistic, what’s possible, what’s plausible. I think that’s why we need to go back and talk about what’s the cost benefit of climate policy. One of the things that are crucial, and I think one of the things that is found very consistently, is that most of the costs are now and most of the benefits are far into the future. One study showed that you’re actually only going to be having net benefits of climate policy after 2080, and other study shows that it’s not going to happen this century, so basically, we’re going to have all costs this century and then we’ll have great benefits in the next century.
That’s a real trade-off, and obviously, a lot of people could argue, again, that was Thomas Shelling’s point that, if we are the poor generation, is this the place where we would want to say the poor generation should be spending all the money and then the rich generation will be even better off in 100 years? That’s a conversation that we rarely have. Again, this is not like it’s secret, and I think we should be thankful a period published studies actually get out, but they’re just not very dominant in the conversation. If we’re going to be spending six trillion dollars on climate policy every year, maybe we’d want to get it right. I think that’s the conversation. That’s where academic freedom actually means that we end up not having a good enough conversation because there’s just a lot of things that are hidden, that are not talked about, and that ends up meaning we do poorer than we otherwise could do. That’s my five or eight minutes or whatever.
Noah:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
How’s academic freedom going in climate?
Noah:
Yeah, it’s going well. Thank you for the invitation. I am not Steve Koonin, but I was invited to replace Steve Koonin on Tuesday, and very, very happy to have the invitation. My understanding from the invitation from your opening remarks yesterday was that the focus was on academic freedom and our institutions in terms of at the university scale, in our scientific societies, our journals, as well as for individual researchers, so that’s where I’ll anchor my remarks. As a point of departure, I want to give you a sense of what my roles are, what my experience base is. I’m a climate scientist. My interests are in understanding the phenomenon that impact people in ecosystems. We need to understand the physical processes that govern those phenomena, the heat waves, droughts, floods, often those kinds of events, not exclusively. We also need to understand what happens to people in ecosystems when those phenomena variant change.
A lot of my work has been on extreme events, not exclusively, and a lot of it’s been on working to understand what causes those events to happen, what causes long-term variations, and asking, framing testable hypotheses about whether there have been changes in those physical processes and the frequency and intensity of those events, and if so, in the impacts, including attempts to quantify the cost and benefits. A lot of my work with Marshall Burke and Francis Davenport here at Stanford in the last few years has been on trying to quantify using empirical methods. That’s my scientific work. I’ve served as a journal editor for a number of journals including both very, very large journal and very large scientific society, including editor-in-chief and also now as an inaugural editor-in-chief of a new journal. I’m also a tenured professor here at Stanford. My second time being a tenured professor. I was at Purdue from 2004 to 2009, moved here in 2009, and I’m a tenured professor and have done a lot of university service, university committees on undergraduate education.
I saw Russell Berman here, so university IntroSems committee when Russell was the chair of that. Graduate education, university-wide budget faculty senate, been on my school’s A&P committee for a number of years. I’ve chaired multiple faculty searches. I’ll be department chair starting January 1st. That’s the basis for my perspective is those experiences. A few thoughts. I’ll start with the university level. Yeah, I guess I’ve been in the room for a lot of decisions about faculty appointment tenure promotions, about budget, about academic freedom, including specific cases of academic freedom as it relates to the university’s openness and research policies. Across all of those university experiences, I have not ever once seen a decision by the institution come down to viewpoint or speech or anything other than what the policy says. Our tenure and promotion policies are public. They’re focused on scholarship and on teaching and mentoring.
I’m happy to talk more about the state of university institutions, but here at Stanford, we have clear policies that are public, and in my experience, they’ve been adhered to. We see that even now with our new school where there’s a lot of debate about sources of funding and including for individual researchers, and the university’s been very clear that we have openness and research policies, and those will be adhered to. As a journal editor, so there are not complete data on this, but I’m pretty confident that in the 10 years I was the climate editor at Geophysical Research Letters, I handled more climate papers than any other individual editor at any journal, so more than 4,000 papers in a decade as handling editor. As a matter of public record, we’ve published a lot of papers that were controversial, and in many cases, we published follow up papers by others critiquing what we had published.
Certainly, when I was editor-in-chief, we had very clear practice that our emphasis was on public debate. If there was a gray area in terms of reviewers disagreeing, in terms of authors disagreeing with reviewers, that our position was the papers should be in the public domain and that debate should happen in public, not stifled behind confidential peer review. As I say, there are plenty of examples of papers that have gotten a lot of attention in the scientific community and the public community that have been vigorously debated in that way. The last thing is just my own experience as an individual since that was mentioned in the opening, and I’ll focus on two areas here. The first is Stanford’s openness and research policy, and it’s adherence to that. I personally have been in a situation where I was being told by funding agency that I could not publish based on the words that were used in a manuscript, and this went through the university policy for openness and research. The university supported me very vigorously. It supported both, not only my right, but my obligation, and it supported me materially.
Again, my own personal experience here at Stanford is that when push has come to shove, that the university has adhered to its stated public openness and research policies. The last thing I’ll say, and this relates a bit to what we heard just about how open the debate is, I think I’ve heard, I’ve been told and observed, there’s a can be a perception that with climate science, there’s a cabal or a club or a team that’s kind of regulating what can get published and what can’t, and the papers that agree with the consensus get kind of shepherded through, and the ones that don’t, get stifled. I actually went through, I had a blog post when I was editor on peer review, and my top comments, my peer review comments that I had received as first author, so I just want to share a few of these in closing just to give you a sense of the level of criticism that’s pointed by our peers in climate science, so here we go.
“Overall, I can see the points that the paper is trying to make, but the analysis is not very clear and the reasoning not necessarily backed up with evidence.” Two reviewers pointed out that the main conclusion of the paper is tautological or meaningless. “The subject is an important one, but I find the paper to be completely unsuitable for publication. I’m afraid that my criticisms are so major that I cannot see a feasible way forward. This paper is a source of serious confusion for me, and perhaps relatedly, also appears to have been hastily written. I’m not even able to judge the scientific merits of this paper as it stands, though the parts I understand appear to be questionable. The approach that is used can be compared to a tapas or dim sum meal. Lots of little morsels but not much depth in any instance.” Finally, “As written, the paper reads like a first draft in which you unloaded your stream of consciousness on the computer.” Thank you.
Speaker 1:
This was great. I think we’re going to have to have a conference possibly with beer where everyone brings in their top five referee letters. We’ll move to medicine now. I think Jay… Yeah, Jay, go next.
Jay:
Okay, so we live in an era where you have a scientific bureaucrat who unironically tells the world that if you question him, you’re not simply questioning a man, you’re questioning science itself. We live in an era where we have a high clarity that declares from on high what is true and what is not true. I wanted to tell you about the pointy end of that with some experiences that I’ve had in the last two and a half years at Stanford. I’ve been at Stanford for 36 years, and for 34 years, I would’ve agreed with you about what Stanford is like, but what I’ve seen is that when you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clarity, your life becomes a living hell. You face a deeply hostile work environment.
I’m just going to give you a couple of vignettes, and I don’t want to dwell too much on them just because they’re painful enough, but I just wanted to give you a sense of what that is actually like in a place like Stanford, which prides itself on academic freedom, but does not actually have academic freedom because academic freedom really only matters when you take controversial positions. Okay, so I wrote a document in October of 2020 called the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s basically the defacto policy. The world, except for China, at this point, is following with COVID. The policy said that there’s a tremendous harm to the poor, the vulnerable, the working class from the lockdown focus policies we’ve followed. The school closures, for instance, around the world have devastated the futures of children, which I think we’re increasingly realizing. I can go on about that. At the same time, there’s a thousand fold difference in the risk of severe disease from COVID infection for older people versus younger people, so the document called for focus protection of older people.
This generated tremendous controversy. The purpose of the document, it’s a one-page document, it was aimed at telling the public that there was not a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, that in fact, many epidemiologists, many doctors, many other people, prominent people, disagreed with the consensus that it was not true that Tony Fauci is the science, and tens of thousands of people, including very prominent people, signed onto this document. Almost a million regular people signed it. You guys can still sign it, by the way. It’s still online. John didn’t sign it, but it’s just FYI. That’s because he doesn’t sign documents. You have principled reason not to. In some sense, I accomplished the goal that I had in mind for it. It was written by me, Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff then at Harvard University. The idea was to tell people that there was an alternative, and that the scientific community had not coalesced around a single lockdown focused policy.
Four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci, calling me, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, probably one of the very best epidemiologists in the world, and Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, one of the fantastic biostatistician epidemiologist, he called the three of us fringe epidemiologists, and then he asked Tony Fauci, “What is being done to organize a devastating takedown of the premises of the Great Barrington Declaration?” I started getting hate mail. I started getting death threats. On campus, people defriended me on Facebook. That was a little juvenile. I started getting questions about… I’ve not taken pharmaceutical money. I’ve not taken any money on my COVID work. I’ve started getting questions about my funding sources, even though most of my funding has come from the NIH through my life.
On campus, it was a chill. A student wrote to me in the Knight Hennessy program, which is a program that the president of the university organized for some fantastic students. She was very interested in Great Barrington Declaration. She wanted me to come and give a talk at the program. She wrote to me that she faced reprisals for suggesting that I give a talk. John Hennessy, the former president of the university, tried to organize a session on campus where I could express my views and there would be somebody from the other side expressing theirs. He couldn’t find someone on the other side to agree. In fact, I’m pretty sure that we or invited people to come on the other side of here that didn’t agree. The thought was that if you platform me, it’s a dangerous thing, but you know what’s dangerous is to not platform if you have a legitimate scientific view, a legitimate policy view to not speak of it. Essentially, what it does is it sends a message that we do not care about the truth.
The tax on campus at that point, on October 2020, were mostly focused… Unfortunately, you’ll hear about Scott Atlas, some of the nastiest attacks I’ve ever seen. Also, John, I think, will talk a little bit about this. I’m going to move forward a few months. I had been in touch… I mean I’d been in touch, but I’d never thought this would ever happen, but I had politicians calling me on my phone. I’ve never talked to a politician before 2020. I’d never written an op-ed before 2020. I just wrote papers for a living, right? Tenured professor at Stanford. I thought what I do for a living is write paper. I told all of my graduate students, “Don’t join Twitter. Just write your papers. It’ll have a bigger impact.” Now, I’m really tempted to look at my Twitter feed. Turns out it’s a really important kind of way to communicate.
Anyways, I got this call from the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, because he’d heard about the Great Barrington Declaration, he’d heard about some of my thoughts, and he asked me, he invited me in March of 2021 to go to a policy round table, a televised policy round table, where he was interviewing me, Sunetra Gupta was there, Martin Kulldorff was there, a couple other folks were there. The idea was that he would ask us scientific questions on matters that he’d prepared me to be able to answer, he told me what he was going to ask me so I could prepare my answer, and televise it so that the public could see what his scientific advisors were telling him. He asked me whether there was any evidence that masking toddlers has any effect on the spread of the disease. That just so happens that there is no randomized evidence at all on whether masking toddlers has any effect on COVID spread.
There’s a lot of controversy in the scientific bureaucracies around this. For instance, the World Health Organization recommends against masking toddlers under six. The European CDC has reservations about masking kids under 12. The evidence on this is thin and there’s not a single randomized study on this, so that’s what I told the governor, and YouTube then censored the video, of course, even though it was a scientific fact what I told the governor. On campus, what happened was that a lot of people didn’t like the scientific fact and didn’t like the fact that I told the public the scientific fact. A few months later, there was a secret petition written by a member of the Department of Epidemiology, I’m not going to name, then circulated by the chair of epidemiology around the medical school quoting me, not directly mentioning my name, but quoting me from this round table with Governor DeSantis, and then the petition was to the president of the university asking that I be censored.
At this point, I’d realized that I really did need to be on Twitter. I did actually need to figure out some way… I mean the press has been used to do hit pieces on me every time with death threats. At the same time, this petition is going around, two friends of mine leaked this to me, there was a poster campaign on campus with a picture of me that was tweeted by Governor DeSantis at this round table. It was posted all over the kiosk on campus during Florida’s big wave of cases in last summer. Florida, of course, has had roughly the same age adjusted mortality from COVID as California has, the excess death rates lower in Florida through the pandemic, but no matter. Essentially, blaming me for the deaths in Florida. They posted this all over campus, including right next to a coffee shop I like to go to. It felt like a physical threat.
For two days, I did not come onto campus, and I said… Okay, I asked my department head whether it was appropriate to have this kind of physical threat on campus, and they effectively did nothing, told me that, “You have to be more careful online.” The policy of the university when push comes to shove is to permit this kind of hostile work environment to go about. For the petition, what I did is I asked some friends of mine at Oxford, not Sunetra, but Carl Hennigan at Oxford, he runs the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, and to write about whether there actually was evidence on masking toddlers that suggested it was a good idea to do it, wrote an op-ed that said that it wasn’t, and then I asked some friends in the press, I now have friends in the press, you guys, to ask the president of university whether he supported censoring me, and of course, he had to say he didn’t, but he didn’t come out and say that he actively supported a free exchange of ideas.
Now, rather than just end with complaining, I wanted to think about what actually happened here, why it happened, an alternate future that could have prevented this. What if there had been open scientific debate on campus sponsored by the university on this so that people could know that there were legitimate alternate views? I actually don’t think there ever was a consensus that when Tony Fauci said he is the science, he was telling a lie. There was an illusion of consensus created by scientific bureaucracy when there never actually was one. It was a misuse of power.
If the president of this university had empaneled a debate in October of 2020 when we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, the campus, there would’ve been a tremendous controversy around it, but at the same time, the cost of work environment would’ve dissipated because what it would’ve said is, “Look, there’s a debate. It’s legitimate to have this debate, places like Stanford where this debate ought to happen.” Instead, what happened was a destruction of the norms of behavior at Stanford by faculty where the leadership of the university looked the other way. Academic freedom is dead because it only matters when there are matters of controversy like this, and if university leaders do not stand up for it, they do not deserve the positions they have. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
John, you’re next.
John:
I am where I hope I’m striving to be a scientist. Hence, I’m probably heavily biased. I have polluted the scientific literature with more than 1,200 publications, and that includes more than 60 peer reviewed papers on COVID-19. According to some social media, I’ve never published anything serious on COVID. Maybe they’re right. I want to make sure that others have the same opportunities as I have been given to publish and to express themselves and to pollute the literature. I want to give far more opportunities, especially to those who disagree with me and who are critical of my work. I systematically avoid receiving myself any funding that may even offer a perception of possible conflicts, and have received no personal funding for my COVID-19 work. I have no political affiliation. I believe that science should not be shadowed by politics, and alas, I have no personal social media.
I did come up with that idea. Actually, the director of… Patricia Marchart came up with the idea of having a field that records many of my ridiculous ideas. If someone wants to watch that, it will waste 75 minutes of their life, but they give a synopsis of why people hate me so much. This is the folio from Hamlet First Edition, the tragical history of the loss of academic freedom. The dramatis persona includes scientists working in the field, scientists working outside the field. For example, you can take the five leading journals that have epidemiology in their title, Epidemiology, American Journal Epidemiology, International Journal Epidemiology, European Journal Epidemiology, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, and try to search how many of the leaders of task forces worldwide had published a single paper in any of these journals. Good luck. Pharma and other health related and disease related industry, journals, editors, and publishers, funders and funding agencies, media and journalists, social media influencers, politicians, big tech stakeholders, common people in partisan belief, in fear, in panic, and or enraged, and combinations, interactions, and collusions of the above, occasionally, even their coexistence in the same person.
The same person may be a scientist working outside the field who moves into the field, who’s also a science media influencer who works with journalists, or becomes a journalist, or becomes a politician, or becomes a minister of health, or becomes all of that, and controls everything. The problem with that tragedy is that all the main heroes die at the end, and the country they’re ought in Denmark is invaded by Fortinbras, an external invader. The problem with human civilization is that there’s no outsider to replace us, so we face climate change at existential threats. Tobacco is killing 10 million people. Hunger, a million people almost are starving with hunger at the moment. We have pandemics with false and weird pandemic responses. We have inequities, inequalities, racism. We have so many problems. If scientists die by their own hand, then who will help?
I was one of the 321 respondents to that nature survey that asked scientists who had commented about COVID-19 whether they had any of these experiences. I had all of these experiences other than being physically attacked, but 60% said that they had attacks on their credibility, 40% plus emotional psychological distress, 30% reputational damage, 20% plus threats of physical or sexual violence, 15% death threats, physical attacks, six of them, and others types of attacks, some of them so weird and so perverse and so unbelievable that I would never have thought that humans would ever do that to other humans. Some little experiential and existential pearls. How does it feel? I have full academic freedom, but I do and did receive death threats. Even worse, there were death threats against my family members. Even worse, there are social media hoaxes like a social media hoax that was organized to claim that my 85-year-old mother had died of coronavirus. It was false of course, but then organized phone calls were made to her phone number to ask her about her funeral. She went into a life-threatening hypertensive crisis she almost died.
This was started by releases by journalists who are doing journalism. Hit stories from journalists are amazing. For example, one of them had multiple sessions with me over many days, over many weeks, and at the end, he said, “So what is the most unethical attack that you have received?” I told him this is the most unethical. What he did publish after 20 sessions was the most unethical attack that it was received that I saw it repeated just a few days ago. Cancel campaigns. I’m Stalin. My place is next to Stalin, Twitter in a poster, fire him or fire other people around him, YouTube censoring, professional attacks right and left. Is it left wing or right wing? Well, the most severe attack I received from right wing in Greece from a person who is extreme right wing, he’s famous because he has argued that immigrants should be sent to barren islands so that they do not pollute the purity of the Orthodox pure Greeks, and he used material from a left wing journalist in the US to attack me.
The general public engage more with science. This is wonderful. This is what we want to see. This is what I have wanted to see in all my academic life. I should have been very careful what I was asking for because suddenly everybody engaged with science, and everybody became a scientist overnight, and everybody became an epidemiologist overnight, and you can see that very plainly in items with optometric scores more than 4,000 points. In the optometric score in the scientific literature, you see that there were a couple of dozen every year, and suddenly, we have 351 just in 2020. I was unfortunate that seven of these papers were papers that I authored, and I was even more ridiculously unfortunate and an idiot that I decided that I should share the information with the white scientific public by issuing pre-prints. 99% of the comments that these scientific papers received that were published in prestigious journals and have been highly cited were favorable, but that 1% of negative comments, if it’s organized, it can completely devastate you.
Along with Vinay Prasad, we published that paper recently on constructive and obsessive criticism science. I’m not going to go through that, but please do take a look if you have some spare time to waste because there are ideas there on how we try to separate that complex of obsessive criticism. I’m in favor of criticism. I love criticism. I think that critics are my best benefactors, but how do we deal with obsessive criticism and how do we find solutions to protect academic freedom and to booster criticism? A couple of months ago, I was director of the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication in Chicago. It was supported by all major journals. Peer review is happening and it does work to some extent, but we need to improve it. We need to find ways to improve it, so any suggestions are more than welcome. Science has been very successful. Science has been too successful, I’m afraid, sometimes. In the case of COVID-19, we published that paper last year showing that 720,000 scientists published scientific papers just within practically one year on COVID-19. They covered all 174 fields of scientific investigation, all science.
The last field to fall to science of COVID-19 was automobile engineering. It had not published anything until December 2020, then it succumbed to COVID-19. These people were not publishing about automobile engineering or transistors or earthquakes. They were publishing COVID epidemiology. Not surprisingly, we saw massive COVIDization of research citation in that paper that we published in PNAS. A few months ago, we saw that 98 of the 100 most cited papers across science were on COVID-19. It was a major threat and major pandemic. Probably, two or three papers would have signaled that it was a major pandemic, not 98 out of 100. It all became COVID. Methodologically, multiple studies show that this science was very poor. Perhaps my science was the worst. I’m completely open to that possibility. But how do we settle things? We settle things with better science, with more science, with more careful science, not with vote counting, not with social media, not with journalists. I disagree with Jay about petitions. I had published before the pandemic that I’m not going to sign petitions on scientific matters. Science is not vote counting.
I repeated my stance during the pandemic. I don’t believe that because Jay collected one million signatures while the John Snow memorandum that includes also many of my friends and many of my colleagues as also the Great Barrington Declaration. They’re all wonderful people. Just because Jay collected more signatures, he’s more right. He may be more wrong. Me who signed neither of both, maybe I’m the most wrong at all, so please prove me most wrong of all. Science is complex. This is a ridiculous paper. The ridiculous contribution was mine, but the brilliant contribution was by David Grimes, my first author, where we tried to model the scientific ecosystem with just 11 equations. We said that there is actually diligent scientists, careless scientists, and unethical scientists, and the vast majority are diligent, and there’s a few careless sometimes, a little bit sloppy, and fraud, very uncommon. We run incentives through the system. Unless we incentivize and we support and defend the diligent, the conscientious, the transparent, the rigorous scientists, they will become extinct. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
This was wonderful. I learned that our inquiry has to focus not just on internal matters, but also on this interface between science and public policy, which is where I notice a lot of the problem. Questions, but the questions will be about academic freedom, not about climate and not necessarily about are masks good or not for toddlers. You get a question if you grab a microphone. That’s the rationing mechanism.
Dorian Abbot:
Hi, Dorian Abbot, University of Chicago. I wanted to thank Noah for coming. I think it was a brave thing to do. I wanted to echo some things he said. In particular, there were two instances in the literature over the past 20 years in climate where I saw a very open debate. The first, some people will know, is called the iris hypothesis of feedback that was proposed and debated openly in the literature. The second was about what they call the hockey stick, and there was a detail about the statistical analysis that led to this, and it was, I felt, debated openly in the literature. One question I wanted Noah and Bjorn to talk about is whether you think there’s an issue with academic freedom per se and things that people are publishing and discussing, or if the issue is more with when the politicians are involved, journalists, and things like that.
Noah:
Yeah, I think those are two great examples. GRL played a role in the open debate in both of those. The hockey stick, that example you mentioned, was before I was editor. I was climate editor of GRL when [inaudible 00:44:12] was published, so yeah, I have some direct involvement in what you’re describing. Speaking of politicians, that paper was read into the Senate record, and indeed, we continued the debate and published follow up papers, I think, fair to call critiques of those papers. Certainly, climate is clearly policy relevant topic, and there’s a interaction between those who are doing the research and those who are the actual decision-makers or the elected officials or other decision-makers. My personal experience with that is I’ve shown up and answering questions when asked, and that’s been state level, congressional, White House, et cetera.
I think that it’s a different kind of communication, there’s no question. I’ll say as on aside, there’s a video of me during congressional testimony being interrupted by the member. Well, I’m trying to answer, and my kids love to heckle me with that video as I’m clearly not responding well facially. I think that as someone who’s engaged with the media, written op-eds myself, engaged with elected officials, there’re different kinds of communication. It’s different. It’s different than teaching. It’s different than what we do at conferences. I think that my personal view, my role is to be objective about the evidence and not have a position on policy action. If I’m talking to a congressional office or other elected officials, it’s literally their job to decide what to do in terms of policy.
Certainly, my own papers, some of them have been policy relevant. We’ve evaluated the economic impacts of two degrees C versus 1.5 degrees C. That’s in the peer review literature. I think one reviewer said, “I winced at the night of a day that I didn’t make it onto my list,” but my point being that my personal view is that it’s important that there’s someone at the table who’s doing the research, who understands the evidence, who’s actually generating the evidence that is just focused on that, and there are plenty of other people who are arguing for what should be done. That’s my own approach ,and I’ve worked hard to stick to it.
Speaker 1:
Looks like Jordan got a microphone.
Bjorn:
Sorry, can I just…
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Bjorn:
Very briefly.
Speaker 1:
We have short answers though.
Bjorn:
I think there is a lot of things that don’t get as much attention. I think a lot of people know very well what are smart things to research and what are less smart things to research. I also think that’s very, very hard to prove and show because it is the kind of thing that you hear from other people. I’ve tried to get this paper in and never gets published and people just say… That’s why I think this lancet that I started off talking about where they deliberately decide to not adjust for population, I think that’s a great example because it’s not the first time they’ve done it. They actually done it several times. I don’t know if you remember last year, there was about 20 journal editors of the biggest medical journals that published their leaders in about 2,800 papers. A lot of them are BMJ offsprings, but basically, saying this one thing, back then it was 50% increase in heat deaths for old people.
There was one other kind of argument. That was their main argument for why medically we should do something about climate, and I called them out on it. I sent letters to all of them. I asked them, “How are you going to redo this?”, and they basically decided not to do it. I understand why they did. What are you going to do? You’re just being caught out. You’re being caught with your pants down and you don’t want to do anything about it. I ended up submitting the paper and they ended up deciding not to publish it, not to make any change in, and now they’ve redone it, which I think shows intent. I think it’s very clear that we have a very clear example of where people simply want to say something that fits the narrative rather than actually doing something that would be academically sound.
Speaker 1:
This is important, and as a conference, I want to encourage us to not just look at the tales of cancellation and silencing, but at the quiet incentives of everyone to produce narrative producing research, or may maybe they’re there, maybe they’re not, but that’s the problem. Jordan got the microphone, and then while we’re doing this, you got that microphone next. I go by who gets the microphone.
Speaker 7:
John, you have a left wing bias. Look over to your right.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Jordan now, and then the next, and then, Ed, you get to go next. Thank you.
Speaker 8:
Dr. Ioannidis, one of the last graphs you put up really struck me. You showed the proportion of unethical scientists accruing research funding increasing across time as funding cycles increase, and the proportion of competent and conscientious sciences decreasing. That strikes me as something that’s relevant to all of the discussions that we’re having right now. I’m very curious about how you derive that data, but it seems to me that what you’re showing there, tell me if you think I’m wrong here, is that once diligent, conscientious, hardworking people build up a storehouse of resources, it opens up a space for the dark triad types to take over, so those are Machiavellian narcissistic psychopaths, fundamentally. Well, that’s the technical description from the personality literature. What they’re very good at doing is mimicking competence, and they do that to steal resources, and then they also engage in the kind of behavior that you listed in the first few slides, which is reputation denigration and reputation savaging. It’s kind of a female antisocial personality type of… It is what is. That’s how female antisocial personality manifests itself, and it scales on social media.
One of the things I think we’re seeing, and not just in the scientific literature, we’re seeing as we virtualize the landscape, we open up the opportunity for Machiavellian psychopaths to steal the resources that have been generated by conscientious people. There’s no punishment for that sort of behavior on social media. In fact, instead of being punished, it’s rewarded by increased attention, and it’s monetized by social media companies. It is a very small percentage of people. It’s between say 1% and 5%. It seems to stabilize around about 3%, but I would also say, historically, and you started your slides with a tongue in cheek historical analysis, is that when societies don’t control that 3% of parasitic psychopaths, then the whole bloody society falls apart and the virtualization has empowered them. It’s a big problem. I’m curious about why you think that happens with repeated funding cycles. Is that they discover where the storehouse of value is and then can exploit it? Is it something like that? Are there personality types associated with that?
John:
I’m not a psychologist and I don’t want to become a psychologist within two seconds to answer that question even though this is what happened with COVID-19 and epidemiology. I think that, practically, the model that we did, which was pre-COVID, just said we have funding cycles, and in each funding cycle, you either level the ground for everyone or you give special incentives. If you level the ground, practically, those who are unethical, they can get there with less effort, with less contribution. They can cut corners and still get the same. When we were doing that modeling, we’re thinking mostly of reproducible research practices and of ways of sharing and transparency and openness and validity checks.
If you want to be a more rigorous scientist, you spend more time to check your own work while someone spending less time or cutting corners or just going for the funding no matter what, or building a social media support system in a journalism system or whatever system to boost his or her presence will get there faster. The progeny from these scientists will be more the number of people who they will train, that they will train with the same ideals, with the same ideologies, with the same distorted ideologies will be far more. Very soon, you’ll be looking for some scientists who are willing to be more rigorous. I’m not saying that this is happening necessarily. I do worry, and this is just a model, and any model could be completely wrong, we saw that repeatedly, but I do worry about cutting corners and infusing science with things that have nothing to do with the scientific method. Nothing to do with the scientific method.
Speaker 1:
Thank you now, John, for having sort of my left wing bias, and then I’ll go to whoever gets mic in the center after that.
Speaker 9:
Thank you, John. First of all, I want to thank Noah for being here. I think it was wonderful. Thank you, Noah, for defending Stanford and defending the policies and defending the practices. I used to defend… I’ve given those exact same arguments. In fact, with some trustees that were complaining about the appointment, the one-sidedness of appointments at Stanford, I said, “Look, I’ve never seen a single appointment file or tenure file in which the politics of the person was actually addressed with one exception,” and that exception was a file from the law school where one of the points raised in favor of the person was that he was a libertarian, and it would add to the political balance of the law school. That’s the only time that I’ve ever seen politics explicitly raised. That said, I don’t believe that it doesn’t come in anymore. I think that it comes in a way that is a matter of human psychology. We’re all very highly trained, we can spot errors and arguments, we can tear apart any particular paper in our field.
That’s what we’re taught to do, and we do it if we disagree with the conclusion, and we don’t do it if we agree with the conclusion, and it’s very natural. I actually think it’s an evolutionary fact about humans that when you see something surprising or that you disagree with or that violates your expectations, you pay more attention to that. If it’s something that you find acceptable, then you don’t. We’re very good at criticizing people who disagree with us and much less good at criticizing or even spotting the errors of people who we agree with. I think that that effect has had a huge impact on the one-sidedness of academia today. I believe that we’re not subject to that when the Stanford’s new school of sustainability offers Bjorn a job, or offers Steve Koonin a job, or offers someone who really is presenting a contrary perspective. I won’t hold my breath, but that’s what I’ll believe that we’ve actually gotten out of this one-sidedness that we’re struggling with, I guess.
Now, I want to say something about Jay and John and your experience. It’s interesting. I think that it’s not a failure of your colleagues that your colleagues criticized you. It’s a failure of the leadership of the university that they did not protect you and guarantee that your views were as respected as widely shared as other people’s. If you look at what Jay has written from the beginning of COVID, I don’t think there’s anybody who has been more consistently right than Jay about a charter, and yet not a single member, as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s not been a single apology for the treatment that Jay received, and that’s a failure. That’s a terrible failure. I think a large part of this is a problem with the leadership of the university and the fact that we are not standing up for true academic freedom, true balance. Anyway, that’s not a question, I guess.
Speaker 1:
Let me ask you. Don’t you also worry about the files that don’t make it to the provost office?
Speaker 9:
Yeah, no, obviously, and there are a lot of things going on other than what I said. For example, there are a lot of people who are simply not going into academia because they don’t feel that they would be comfortable in academia. I think there’s a huge number of people that choose not to go into academia, and that’s terrible. I know a number of these people myself related to some of them who have chosen not to go into academia because they don’t feel comfortable given… Anyway.
Speaker 1:
As for the rules, it’s not jeopardy. You don’t have to phrase it as a question, so beautiful comments like that are welcome.
Speaker 10:
I think we should announce it. He may not realize that he’s talking [inaudible 00:59:04] he said he had those files.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Yeah.
Noah:
[inaudible 00:59:09] was not only the provost when I was hired, but I think when you retired, I probably had been provost when half the faculty at Stanford had been hired, something like that.
Speaker 1:
We’re going to do one short question with short answer.
Speaker 11:
Yeah. I should make a short question for a change. Concerning Noah and Jay, you have very, very different views about the role of Stanford University in connection with [inaudible 00:59:33], so how do you explain the disconnect?
Jay:
I would’ve agreed with Noah two years ago. I love this place.
Speaker 11:
Why haven’t you done in the last two years? I mean why…
Jay:
I don’t know. Maybe I was a fool for 34 years.
Speaker 1:
Let’s let Noah write a paper with Bjorn and see how it goes.
Noah:
I think, number one, I don’t want to portray that I’ve personally received what was described here, but I’ve been receiving, in terms of what you showed on the poll for COVID researchers as a climate scientist in response to what I’ve published, I’ve been receiving… I have not been attacked physically, but otherwise I would’ve answered yes to the rest of them as a climate scientist going back, starting even when I was at Purdue, so early 2000s, mid 2000s, and up until now. That has been part of the landscape as a climate scientist as well. My experience at Stanford has been that, again, the institution has been extremely supportive.
Jay:
I think that’s the difference between you and me, Noah. I mean that the institution has not been supportive the last… [inaudible 01:00:59], I have to thank you. I’m grateful to you and I’m grateful that you have been very few lights at Stanford that where I’ve felt like I’ve had some ability to say what I believe, but that has not been the norm at Stanford the last two and a half years. It just has not. It’s a really tragic thing because I thought this institution really did stand for letting the wins of freedom.
I want to be corrected if I’m wrong. When John tells me I’m wrong, I stake out my position with fear and trembling. I’m almost always wrong when John’s right. I just want the ability to have a normal academic discussion where we can fight with each other. We say, “Okay, here’s the data point. Jay’s wrong, and then I’ll buy you lunch or something. Then I don’t fight on the next thing. I think that what’s happened the last two and a half years opened my eyes. It doesn’t exist. At the time when it most needed to exist, it doesn’t exist here.
Speaker 1:
Well, somebody has to have the last word, and since we’re over time, sorry, by random chance, it goes to Jay. Now, we’re going to move on to the war on the West with Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.