How and why bad ideas stick around, and why it matters
This piece was co-authored by Nason Maani, and his version is cross-posted here
In theory science should be self-correcting. We count on science to be self-correcting for science to do the work that society expects it to do. In no small part the value proposition of science is that, left to its own devices without explicit oversight from governments or other external authority, it can do good work that advances our collective understanding and shared societal goals. Part of that good work has to be ensuring that we ask the right questions and have the right answers, and that if we sometimes articulate the wrong answer (as we undoubtedly will many-a-time, as part of the actual process) we then correct ourselves and move to the right answer. No less than Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize twice, published a paper proposing the triple-helix as the structure of DNA, a notion that was, simply, wrong. The problem may be that such correction sometimes (often?) does not happen, and that science is not as self-correcting as it could (or should?) be. Others have written about impediments to scientific self-correcting that, if left uncorrected, can lead to perpetuating fallacies. Our concern, in this Ideas about Ideas piece, is to ask why this is, and its implications for the generation of ideas that should occupy our research agenda.
Let us start first with what we mean by “bad ideas”. One could imagine three categories of bad ideas: ideas that were wrong and are quickly corrected (as in the Linus Pauling example above), ideas that are wrong and do not get corrected, and ideas that we may simply dislike on the basis of values. It is only the second of these categories that is our concern. The third is often, and incorrectly, conflated with the second. All fields have people who call a contested position a “bad idea”, in some cases to save the work of arguing with it. Such argument—against ideas that we disagree with—should be the core function of science, not something to ward against. What is worth thinking about and warding against are ideas whose central empiric claim has been tested and failed, but which nonetheless continue to be cited, taught, funded, or used to justify policy. That means that we are not concerned with ideas that have critics, but with ideas which the weight of evidence disproves, but simply do not go away in spite of this.
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