[p2p-research] The evolution of P2P science

[Tomas Rawlings]

Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Tom,
> I don't know if you have time, but this would be a really good blog topic!
>
So here it is...I've scheduled it on the blog for about a week, so 
feedback welcome! Thanks.

The Democratising of Science: Research in the p2p age & Why the climate 
email hack may turn out to be a good thing

The hacking of emails written by scientists at the Climate Research Unit 
has produced lots of comment and copy about the efficacy of climate 
science and seems to have done damage to the reputations of the 
scientists and sciences involved. However the response to this incident 
– an opening up and peering of science that should be the response to 
this incident, will benefit us all.

I’ve always felt that science is in essence, quite a democratic idea – 
this may seem the opposite of how some perceive scientists to be; cold, 
logical and aloof people getting their perspective from laboratories far 
from the real world. When I did science at school (and to be fair I was 
not that great at it) the concept that you could do the experiments to 
find things out for yourself rather than simply accepting what was 
written in the text books was, well…punk. The scientific method has at 
its core some very democratic principles: First is that when something 
is correct – it is so because that’s what the evidence says and this is 
regardless of the status of the person advocating and/or the view of 
society to the point being made. When Copernicus suggested that the 
earth rotated around the sun, it made those in power very unhappy – but 
the democracy of the evidence pushes the point regardless of the 
discomfort of the Catholic Church. Second is that you have to back your 
claims with both evidence and method – this in turn drives transparency 
and peer-involvement. It is the essence of peer-review; that others need 
to be able to see behind the curtain of your claims. This is also a 
democratic principle because when making claims in science you can’t 
rely on your position in society, your wealth or your power; you have to 
lay bare the foundations of your ideas for inspection and in doing to 
open them to challenge.

Now these are all lofty claims – the reality is often very different. 
The scientific method has noble ideas and claims, yet where it meets 
human nature, it often gets a little lost. Scientists are very human; 
they can, and do, get things wrong. They can, and do, make mistakes – 
and then sometimes try to cover-up those mistakes. Politics and not data 
can corrupt findings either by influencing the process or burying 
unfavourable outcomes. This is both a limitation and the main point of 
these democratic ideals. A limitation because it imposes by human flaws 
into how the system operates. The main point, because the requirement to 
share method and data – to open it up to your peers – is one of the ways 
we seek to iron out these flaws.

There is another process within science that is also important to 
understand; it’s interpretation. When I was taught science in school we 
were told that the idea behind the layout of an experimental write-up 
(abstract, introduction, method, results, conclusion etc) was structured 
as such so that anyone with a good grasp of language and maths could 
read it and understand it. Again, this is another noble and democratic 
ideal that often flounders in reality. Most areas of science are so 
complex that you need a better grounding in the specific area than the 
paper’s introduction may offer in order to set the correct context. The 
maths used in research has developed significantly since Copernicus and 
are the methods available require much more than basic maths to 
understand. As such most people outside the field rely on an interpretor 
to locate important findings, translate them into normal speech and 
summarise them in an accessible way – this function is most often done 
by the media. But just as scientists are very human; they can, and do, 
get things wrong – so are journalists. They can, and do, make mistakes – 
and then sometimes try to cover-up those mistakes. The politics of a 
media outlet can and does corrupt findings either by influencing the 
selection of reports and interviewees or by twisting outcomes to that 
media outlet’s narrative into favourable shapes.

This is where the changes in communication technology come into the 
story. First, science now has the opportunity to add many more peers 
into the process; it is much easier than ever before to collaborate, 
exchange data and ideas and discuss methods. We can all become peers; 
reviewing papers, performing experiments. We can control for the 
problems in the complexity of the process by aggregating resources and 
allowing people to focus on the aspects that they are most equipped to 
do. An example of this is the SETI at home project – where people can 
aggregate their efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 
There are various levels of involvement to the project from the most 
basic entry level of installing the software (that uses downtime of 
people’s computers to analyse data) to assisting with the development of 
the software itself (called BOINC). This is not a perfect example of a 
fully democratic project for a number of reasons, for example the code 
for BOINC is not open source and getting direct involvement with the 
small handful of people coordinating the project working for Berkeley is 
hard; but it is a start.

Second is that changes in communication technology allow much more scope 
for scientists to communicate without the middleman of the media. We’ve 
seen a proliferation of science blogging – some amazing while others are 
poor – but all allow direct communication on a level not possible a 
couple of decades ago. This is key, because from my experience of 
chatting to scientists they are not cold, logic, aloof people getting 
their world-view from laboratories – but human beings who are totally 
engaged in the real world – and know how messy it is. It is often the 
media interpretation of their work that likes to cull the complexities 
to make the research fit an ongoing narrative rather than report it, 
warts and all. Climate science is a classic example of how this is 
happening in practice; while those unhappy with the consensus on climate 
change have plenty of outlets and blogs – so we see more and more and 
more of the scientists themselves weighing in to speak directly with the 
public. Realclimate is a great example of this, where not only do the 
climate scientists post articles about the latests research and news 
items, but they also answer people’s questions in the comments sections.

However there is a downside to this; it does mean that people will try 
to use the data to arrive at pre-determined positions that are 
unscientific. They will do this anyway and so this is a danger, yes. It 
means people will abuse the data and process in all sorts of horrendous 
ways to suit thier political agendas. This is also a danger. Yet the 
same peer-principles that allow this abuse are also the key to 
de-bunking it. Let me give an example – the Global Historical 
Climatology Network (GHCN). This is a datset of temperature records from 
1880 to the present day. It is simple to download the data and then do 
as you will with it. One user published a paper that purported to show 
that global warming was not happening as was claimed and that the 
adjustments made were distorting the picture - while another responded 
to this claim with another use of the same dataset displaying the 
changes applied by the scientists to the raw data in a simple graph to 
show how little change was going on. This graph is a simple and powerful 
refute to the obfuscation of the facts and is all the more powerful 
because it was developed independently of those who generate the data. 
Without this data being available and without the peer analysis of the 
data, the claims and counter claims lack any objective – and verifiable 
objectivity to them.

What has become apparent to me in the aftermath of the hacking incident 
is that is that the broad response (but sadly not all) to the hacking 
has been to both open-up the data and source-code being used to drive 
climate science, but also to also force more scientists involved to 
spend more time engaging with people in regard their work. It is going 
to be harder and harder for scientists to keep data private by default – 
which is good – and I would hope we move to a position where this is 
both best practice and the norm.