[p2p-research] On scientific integrity, Climategate, and P2P

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Rex Murphy questions the scientific integrity in parts of the climate 
research community (based on the recent emails released) here:
   "Rex Murphy on Climategate"
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIEQqLokL8

The problem is that what is talked about by Rex Murphy extends to most or 
all of science, especially from corporate involvement, too, but he does not 
go there.

In the case of climate change, people can still be right even if 
business-as-usual in academia is problematical. But, as Freeman Dyson (a 
long critic of the PhD system) points out too, the social process around 
that information can be broken:
   "Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society" by Freeman Dyson
  http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
"""
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the 
warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause 
problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it 
better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take 
away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more 
important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and 
public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the 
oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of 
adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.
"""

James P. Hogan writes in his "Kicking the Sacred Cow" something similar:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=37
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0743488288/0743488288.htm
"The factors bringing this about are various. Massive growth of government 
funding and the direction of science since World War II have produced 
symbiotic institutions which, like the medieval European Church, sell out to 
the political power structure as purveyors of received truth in return for 
protection, patronage, and prestige. Sometimes vested commercial interests 
call the tune. In areas where passions run high, ideology and prejudice find 
it easy to prevail over objectivity. Academic turf, like any other, is 
defended against usurpers and outside invasion. Some readily trade the 
anonymity and drudgery of the laboratory for visibility as celebrities in 
the public limelight. Peer pressure, professional image, and the simple 
reluctance to admit that one was wrong can produce the same effects at the 
collective level as they do on individuals."

Compare with broader statements about the loss of scientific integrity by 
these other sources:

David Goodstein (previously Vice Provost of Caltech) has been writing (and 
even testifying to Congress) on this for at least two decades in relation to 
the ending of the exponential growth of academia in the 1970s:
   "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein
   http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"""
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent 
years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. 
There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves 
under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if 
necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure 
to become more common.
   Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer 
review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical 
danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to 
publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to 
decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in 
some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees 
who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose 
identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. 
Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what 
results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
   Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of 
course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or 
revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long 
as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all 
suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for 
editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, 
not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of 
interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This 
point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to 
any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the 
black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to 
avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own 
interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical 
standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by 
unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many 
examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential 
expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult 
future we face.
"""

A related book on progressive desensitization in things like ethics:
   "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad 
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts":
   http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
"""
Social psychologists Tavris and Aronson, each of whom has published other 
works, here tackle "the inner workings of self-justification," the mental 
gymnastics that allow us to bemoan the mote in our brother's eye while 
remaining blissfully unaware of the beam in our own. Their prose is lively, 
their research is admirable and their examples of our arrogant follies are 
entertaining and instructive.
"""

and:

"Jeff Schmidt's Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals 
and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives"
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
"""
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt 
demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of 
the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He 
shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals 
are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict “ideological 
discipline.”
"""

and:

"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of 
higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors 
argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit 
companies"

And, of course, the compulsory K-12 education that leads up to grad school 
and sets the tone:
   "A conspiracy against ourselves"
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated 
industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions 
of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an 
egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like 
the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, 
any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a 
concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they 
fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor 
Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, 
Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training 
than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its 
requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in 
four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like 
work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression 
for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat 
business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a 
thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or 
fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the 
company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the 
books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be 
safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

Anyway, it is interesting how it was the exposure of private P2P 
communications (the emails) that brought this issue to public attention in a 
limited way. How can P2P help more with public integrity? Does the secretive 
nature of using p2p in science really help the process? Or does it hurt it?

Why can Newsweek state something like the first few works of this and people 
just accept it? Why is there such a gap between "reputation" and real 
communications? How can our society deal better with that somehow?
   "The Truth About ‘Climategate’" by Sharon Begley
   http://www.newsweek.com/id/225778
"""
Few of us would escape with reputations intact if our e-mail were made 
public, and the scientists ensnared in "climategate" are no exception. 
Writing "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps 
to each series for the last 20 years … to hide the decline" makes Phil Jones 
of the University of East Anglia, who typed that in 1999, look as if he is 
pulling a fast one to conceal a trend toward global cooling. And when 
another scientist wrote that "I can't see either of these papers being in 
the next I.P.C.C. report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we 
have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" it looks like a 
blatant attempt to censor opposing views.
"""

Would those statements actually have been so problematical as far as 
integrity in a public mailing list? They would have been discussed at least. 
Is it acceptable to have biases (everyone does) as long as they are not 
hidden biases? Or is this an area where new information processing tools, 
like structured argument systems, may play a role, where people with 
different biases are working together to produce some collective product (as 
previously mentioned here, relating to work done at SRI on this topic for 
the intelligence community).
"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and 
Catton)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004130.html
"[p2p-research] Re: the wikipedia decline"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006156.html
"[p2p-research] P2P platforms for wide ranging discussions beyond email?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005553.html
I have some more I've written on that as well.

Three links on this topic (all stuff from over a decade ago):

   "IBIS: Structured Discussion"
   http://www.cs.unc.edu/~dewan/290/s97/notes/app/node23.html
"PREP columns provide only one way to organize the discussion of an issue. 
IBIS (Issue-based Information System) [] is a more sophisticated method to 
capture the rationale behind decisions. It formally supports the notions of 
issues, positions about these issues, arguments for positions, and captures 
the relationships among them. IBIS is a textual tool that displays these 
relationships using indented text. "

   "CLARE"
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~dewan/290/s97/notes/app/node24.html#SECTION00013500000000000000
"Based on issue-based argumentation, IBIS is only [a] way to structure a 
discussion. Designed for collaborative learning of a research paper, CLARE 
(Collaborative Research And Research Environment) offers an even more 
structure for organizing a discussion and integrates it with a process 
model. Thus, it consists of two components, RESRA, which defines the 
discussion structure, and SECAI, which defines the process model. "

(See: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~dewan/290/s97/notes/app/app.html for more.)

And:
   "Graphical Ibis"
   http://www.weblogkitchen.com/wiki.cgi?GraphicalIbis
"Kunz's Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) provide a framework for 
collaborative understanding of the major issues and implications surrounding 
what are described as ``wicked problems'' (problems that lack a definitive 
formulation). Understanding is achieved by using hypertext components to 
create structured arguments surrounding the issues. ... Interactions in the 
gIBIS (graphical IBIS) system centered around a graphic overview of the 
emerging hypertext network. New nodes and links were always created in this 
global context."

Beyond better information processing tools, personally, I feel a "basic 
income" (or gift economy, or local subsistence with 3D printing and organic 
gardening robots, or something else as a broad social change) would help 
scientific integrity enormously. Many of these "scientific" issues are 
really indirectly fights about getting the resources to do science in the 
first place, as David Goodstein's points out on the collapse of peer review, 
where there is now (since the 1970s) a scarcity of grants relative to 
demand, given an over-production of PhDs relative to academic needs or 
related funding. If everyone in the world had the equivalent of a graduate 
student fellowship from a basic income, while there still might be fighting 
over lab budgets for supplies and equipment, I'd hope the general level of 
direct conflict might be less. There would be less of a link between 
"reputation" and the ability to do research at all. There is a lot of good 
research people can do without great expense -- some of it even might be 
better and more clever and more basic than people with expensive toys -- now 
that everyone has a cheap computer and cheap communications.  And much of 
the expenses in science are people time. Even expensive equipment can be 
made by collectives to the extent that the cost is labor and not rent. And 
improvements in 3D printing and local subsistence will more and more allow 
people to convert their time directly into high-tech products and bypass 
paying rent. Globally, as far as science, with a basic income, the whole 
world would have become a version of a re-imagined Princeton University:
"Making the whole world into Princeton University, or how Princeton locally 
stands in the way of Princeton globally :-)"
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Also related, by me as a co-author from 2001, about engineering, but the 
same goes for science:
   "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development..."
   http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"At this moment nearly every engineer on earth has a powerful and globally 
networked computer in his or her home. Collaborative volunteer efforts are 
now possible on an unprecedented scale. Moores's Law predicts continued 
reductions ... in the cost of bandwidth, storage, CPU power, and displays - 
which will lead to computers a million times faster, bigger or cheaper in 
the next few decades. Collaboration software such as for sending email, 
holding real-time video conferences, and viewing design drawings is also 
reducing in cost; much of it is now effectively free. This means there are 
now few technical or high-cost barriers to cooperation among engineers, many 
of whom even now have in their homes (often merely for game playing reasons) 
computing power and bandwidth beyond anything available to the best equipped 
engineers in the 1970s. "

Centuries ago, most science was P2P, though only the moderately wealthy 
(e.g. Charles Darwin) could take part in it. A basic income, a gift economy, 
or widespread nanotech-level 3D printing would level this playing field 
quite a bit.

So, is P2P for science commons ultimately the resolution to the problem 
posed by Climategate? Or the larger social problems with scientific 
integrity that Climategate represents if one starts digging deeper?

As Sharon Begley said in the Newsweek article above:
"""
Many of the e-mails refer to attempts to evade requests from critics for raw 
data, some of which comes from national meteorological offices that, when 
they sent Jones the data, required confidentiality for hardly more reason 
than "we can, so let's." Really, all climate data "needs to be publicly 
available and well documented," Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a leading 
researcher on the climate-hurricane link, wrote in an open letter to climate 
scientists. This includes "how the data were treated and manipulated, what 
assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data [were] 
omitted and why." To be sure, most of the data, and even the computer codes 
used to analyze them, have been freely available for years (not buried in Al 
Gore's backyard). But all the data and methodology should be in the public 
domain. Yes, critics will cherry-pick and play "gotcha," as they have with 
the e-mails, but the science of climate change is robust enough to withstand 
that.
"""

So, that is essentially a demand for a public commons about science at all 
levels of investigation. But it needs to be further and broader to improve 
scientific integrity in other parts of science. For example, what about the 
science related to medicine? Why should secrecy be allowed and encouraged in 
that area which affects more people's lives on a daily basis than climate 
change? Or why should the science (and software technology) about cars that 
drive themselves be proprietary when all our lives will depend on it when 
traveling anywhere on the road in a decade or so?

Related by me (two items, the second a shorter version of the first):
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy 
In a Post-Scarcity Society "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"On Funding Digital Public Works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"""
Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, 
and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their 
grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model 
of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to 
improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector 
overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to 
requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials 
freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right 
for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further 
permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably 
subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. 
The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary 
copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it 
results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of 
helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little 
cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through 
charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, 
with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by 
the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, 
perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up 
to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by 
requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and 
donations.
"""

Anyway, it seems to me that Climategate is really just the tip of an iceberg 
of problems with scientific integrity under scarcity and competition for 
grants. So improving scientific integrity is another impetus to 
transitioning to a post-scarcity economy in various ways (and P2P is part of 
that, as I see it). But even without a broader transition, one can think 
about how P2P and peer commons production under free and open licenses fits 
into improving scientific integrity.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/