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What do you think about the stories in this week's Science news?
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rshowalt - 07:43am Jan 4, 2000 EST (#381 of 386)
In "Geniuses, Crackpots and a Grand Unified Theory"
JAMES GLANZ makes an important point. People with ideas off of the mainstream, right or wrong, are a nuisance. There's an extraordinary presumption against them. That presumption is statistically justified. Nor are individual scientists, or scientific organizations, or journalistic operations, well set up to handle them.
There's another side of the story, one I set out, with my friend and colleague, the late Professor Stephen J. Kline, of Stanford University and the National Academy of Engineering, a man who the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers suggested was the most distinguished theoretical and computational fluid mechanician of the 20th century. We decided that there was an error in the derivation of differential equations from coupled physical models. We couldn't get our work checked to a reasonable closure. He and I wrote this, and posted it in a TIMES forum about six months before Steve's death. I believe it fits today - it makes the case that "deviant" work COULD be valid, and ought not to be rejected out of hand. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/whytimes2 I spoke at Steve's memorial service at Stanford - people with some interest in the kind of work Steve did, and the difference it made to his field, might enjoy http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul Pieces of this eulogy were published by a professional journal thereafter.
Steve and I asked for something difficult in the world as it stands - an institutional ability to respond, in a timely manner, to points that could be reasonably described, right or wrong, by the term "paradigm conflict." I mean by "paradigm conflict" a pattern where people with different ways of thinking systematically misunderstand each other.
Steve and I both understood the "crackpot problem" and both did our best to offer clear argument. Efforts through channels were made, before efforts outside channels were initiated.
*********** Anybody who claims an impasse, at the level of paradigm conflict, about an issue in science, medicine, or engineering ought to meet some careful standards to get a hearing. But the standards ought not to be impossible. And the consequences ought not to be draconian for the people involved.
It helps to focus on the kind of question that is likely to involve a perceptual conflict that leads to an impasse. In retrospect, such impasses always look pretty simple in a logical sense. But there are human difficulties. A central point is this:
"He who troubleth his own house will inherit the wind."........ Proverbs 11 29
A central requirement for an umpiring process is that the umpires be SEPARATE from the "house" of either parties. Competence is needed. Distance, and connection to widely held social standards of good sense, are needed as well.
Our society is not well set up for handling such problems (or, for fielding crackpots) - both aspects of the same job of considering new ideas. The place where such problems are handled best is the United States Patent Office, particularly since the Re-examination procedures have been available for cases with real economic stakes.
One of the things government does, and has to do, is umpiring that takes distance from the interests of the particular stakeholders. Often that umpiring is done, wholly or in part, by "government bureaucrats." At other times, advice comes from people whose status comes, in part, from government association. For example, the national academies (NAS, NAE, and IOM) are government institutions that scientists and politicians respect, with reason. Members of the National Academy of Sciences , or the National Academy of Engineering , or the Institutes of Medicine , are a carefully chosen and widely respected elite among scientists, engineers, and medical people.
There are more than five thousand of them, in all. Membership in the academies is by election of members, and is carefully done.
The government needs outside advice, and has institutional interfaces to get it, but government does a lot of essential work itself, as well. Some government institutions are necessarily rule-based bureacracracies. Intellectual standards in these institutions can be very high, especially when there is much institutional distrust, at many levels, that results in careful checking for right answers.
The United States Patent Office does too much work to be infallible, but it is very well organized to consider any and every technical issue that comes before it, has close connections all through the civilian and military parts of the government, and has, in my experience, the most impressive reference system for technical purposes anywhere. When the PTO lacks expertise, it can do a very good job of finding it. Patent examiners are specialists, and they are in the business of evaluating ideas, by clear rules, and killing off most requests. The standards of clear description required at the Patent Office are the clearest I know - meticulously so, in a way that must weary journalists, who are different kind of descriptive business.
When the Patent Office examines a non contested patent, the process involves resources that are limited. Oversights happen.
When a patent is contested (when there are real chips) there is a re-examination procedure that is much more careful, and very much more credible. Stakeholders are heard, and any expertise, from anywhere, can be brought to bear. I admire the reexamination procedure a good deal. The courts have come to respect it, and defer to it, though essentially every step in the re-examination procedure is subject to appeal in the courts. The reexamination procedure is one of the reasons why patents are now far more valuable than they used to be, and patent litigation is now much more predictable than it once was. (The other main reason is the institution of a Court of Patent Appeals.)
I do not know and do not believe that there is any matter in science or math likely to involve a perceptual impasse that the Patent Office couldn't judge pretty well, and considerably better than either of the contestants involved. The PTO does similar things, every day, and money and egos are involved almost every time.
**** Again, anybody who claims an impasse, at the level of paradigm conflict, about an issue in science, medicine, or engineering ought to meet some careful standards to get a hearing. But the standards ought not to be impossible. And the consequences ought not to be draconian for the people involved.
I'd suggest a process where a modification of the U.S. Patent Office Reexamination Procedure was made available, at the Patent Office's discretion, on the recommendation of two (perhaps three) members of one of the national academies (NAS, NAE, or IOM).
If I were consulted, I'd suggest that the recommendations of the academicians be confidential, as much NAS correspondence is.On receipt of the recommendations, and a clear request for a hearing according to established PTO procedures, the PTO could determine whether it would examine the case or not. If PTO did not find the request credible, or did not find that it had the competence to examine the issue, examination could and should be denied. I'd suggest that the PTO have the right to deny a hearing, at its sole discretion, without chance for appeal.
Suppose the PTO agreed to hear the case. Re-examination rules already in place would work well, with minor modifications. Stakeholders would be consulted. PTO reexamination is a tough, fair, careful public business.
The result I'd suggest would be a clear written decision, on the merits of the issue, by the PTO. The decision need not be binding on anyone at all. But it would carry weight. Not all the weight in the world, but enough weight that it would go a long way toward resolving the impasse.
Would there be people, including scientists, who might laugh at the decision? Sure. Nothing wrong with that. Even so, the decision would carry weight, either for a conceptual change, or against it.
The kinds of cases involved are likely to be SIMPLE in a logical sense.
In the case of fluid mechanics, the question was whether turbulent fluid flow was a statistical process decoupled from any sensible connection to fine scale Newtonian physics, or whether if was a process with structure, connected to the differential equations that govern other physics, and other fluid flow. This was a question of fact and logic, together. In retrospect, the people on the statistical side (almost everybody) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved a decade, and much ugliness.
In the case of McCully, the question was whether McCully's data made sense, or whether he was delusional, in a circumstance that was technically and morally quite clear. . Again, the people who shunned McCully (everybody who mattered for McCully's careeer, and for scientific decision) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved decades, and many lives.I believe that a relatively minor modification of our institutional usages could resolve paradigm conflicts, at low cost, and make our scientific usages much more efficient than they are now, in the places where current usages look worst.
None of the people involved would be need to be "mere government payrolled bureaucratic obscurantists." For the issues that matter in conceptual conflicts, it is entirely reasonable to ask of a full enough grasp of the scientific issues involved. In the cases I know about, those issues have been quite simple.
No human group is perfect for everything. Nor can any set of instititions be perfect for everything. The people who population institutions, after all, have the limitations of consciousness, so well discussed in this forum. That means they are fallible. It seems to me that a minor change in procedures for dealing with conceptual conflict might be useful insurance, so that very serious mistakes, that we know occurred in the past, might be avoided, or made less expensive, in the future.
There would be another use. If a scientist, to scientific group, or journalist, was faced with a person claiming paradigm conflict, they could say:
"We have an institutional arrangement for that. The procedures are rough, but fair - go through channels."Anybody who had a good idea (and any academic group which had a good reason to contest the stance of another) would have a good chance of both being heard, and being validated to a limited but significant extent, by such a procedure.
And the crackpots, who really do exist, would be less trouble.
Bob Showalter
