You Are the Weakest Link 

Today, The Volokh Conspiracy has two interesting posts (here and here) about "Excommunicating Scientists". This is in reference to a post by Alexandra Samuel (a Political Science PhD herself) about how she thinks that Condi Rice's PhD should be some how removed because her political science views are so far outside the "mainstream" of other political scientists as to be shameful. She says in her post:

So I've been thinking: shouldn't political science have its equivalent to disbarment or excommunication? After all, if we want the term "political scientist" to mean something, then a doctorate shouldn't be a one-way ticket. When political scientists promulgate ideas or institute policies that violate even the most generous interpretations of our collective wisdom, they are not only disregarding their own academic training, but devaluing the intellectual authority and standards of our field. So shouldn't there be some threshold - it can be a generous one - beyond which one loses the right to practice political science?

The Conspiracy comes up with some excellent questions for her... and also points to this speech by Michael Crichton on this very topic:

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

It is people like Dr. Samuel that give real scientists a bad name. Being an engineer, I know the rigors that one goes through in the scientific method. I'm no fan of the "soft sciences" in general. Don't get me wrong. I think that political science is a good field of study. I just hate the name Political Science. It's not a science. Economics is also not a science, though it is often lumped in when talking about the "soft sciences". At least they have the common sense to keep the word science out of the name.

The scientific method is all about testing a hypothesis in a rigorous, reliable, and repeatable way. Some of the greatest advances in science has come from people asking questions about how our current knowledge set, coming up with a theory, and then experimenting to either prove or disprove that theory. It's what is known as advancement.

What I believe we are losing as of late, is our willingness to accept failure. Scientific advance in either direction is still an advance. If your hypothesis is wrong, that should be just as exciting to you as if it were right. You just figured out how something doesn't work! Congratulations! Thomas Edison one said "I know more ways not to do something than any man alive." But if you look at how data is massaged in scientific studies these days, people try to invent experiments not to truly test their hypothesis, but more to ensure that they're hypothesis looks correct. So what do they learn by performing the experiment, other than it makes good news, and they can get grant money.

What Dr. Samuels is suggesting is that people should be punished not only for being wrong in their hypothesis, but that merely suggesting a hypothesis counter to current thinking should be punishable. Imagine if Einstein had never dared to counter Newton. Imagine if Bohr had never even though that Rutherford might be wrong. Where would we be today? If political science cannot handle that kind of rigorous scrutiny, then it is even further away from being a real science than even I thought.