Political Academia With Stephen Hsu

Political Academia With Stephen Hsu

"Steve, lately we’ve been thinking about the interaction of politics and science. You’ve mentioned that a colleague of yours once sought funding for better climate models, but it had to be done without implying that current models had any problems. How does politics sometimes constrain the scientific process?

This individual is one of the most highly decorated, well-known climate simulators in the world. To give you his history, he did a PhD in general relativity in the UK and then decided he wanted to do something else, because he realized that even though general relativity was interesting, he didn’t feel like he was going to have a lot of impact on society. So he got involved in meteorology and climate modeling and became one of the most well known climate modelers in the world in terms of prizes and commendations. He’s been a co-author on all the IPCC reports going back multiple decades. So he’s a very well-known guy. But he was one of the authors of a paper in which he made the point that climate models are still far from perfect...

We’re nowhere near actually being able to properly simulate the physics of these very important features...

In no way are these microphysics of cloud formation being modeled right now. And anybody who knows anything knows this. And the people who really understand physics and do climate modeling know this.

So he wrote a paper saying that governments are going to spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars on policy changes or geothermal engineering. If you’re trying to fix the climate change problem, can you at least spend a billion dollars on the supercomputers that we would need to really do a more definitive job forecasting climate change?

And so that paper he wrote was controversial because people in the community maybe knew he was right, but they didn’t want him talking about this... the anecdote gives you a sense of how fraught science is when there are large scale social consequences. There are polarized interest groups interacting with science...

He was airing some well known dirty laundry that all the experts knew about. But many of them would say it’s better to hide laundry for the greater good, because a bad guy—somebody who’s very anti-CO2 emissions reduction— could seize on this guy’s article...

"I’m not an expert in climate science, but I am an expert in evaluating the uncertainty of mathematical models and simulation models—so I asked him well, Professor X, why are you confident that you’re directionally right?

He couldn’t really give me a very good answer, at least by the standards of most rational physicists. He sort of just said, “Well, look, I’ve worked with this, I’ve worked in this field a long time and have a feel for it. I’m pretty sure we are getting it right, even though it maybe can’t be rigorously justified.” And so he wasn’t able to take that part of his experience and knowledge and transfer it to me so that I had an equally high confidence level...

To me, the highest level of discussion is more in terms of probability distributions—I believe this with a certain confidence level, I should insure against that tail risk. It’s worth spending a trillion dollars a year in the global economy to insure against that tail risk.

I think that’s a defensible argument that people can make. But that’s obviously way too sophisticated for governments that couldn’t even figure out how to do cost-benefit analysis in the face of COVID-19. You can’t just can’t engage in that highest level of discussion if it’s a contested political landscape...

When scientists come out in public, they want to project absolute confidence so they can convince the senator to do what they want, or the billionaire to make the donation. They can’t express uncertainty because if they do, the billionaire has other things to do with his money. “Oh, well, if you’re unsure about climate, I guess I can just build homeless shelters! My economist friend tells me there’s a great ROI on homeless shelters, they’re awesome.”

So the incentives are not quite right. The incentives in the academy are to find truth, and that’s a messy business. It’s got to be messy, people have to be able to clash. You cannot point a finger at the guy clashing with you and say, “Oh, you think the systematic error in my model is twice as big as I said it was. So you must be a climate denier!”

 In my lifetime, the way science is conducted has changed radically, because now it’s accepted—particularly by younger scientists—that we are allowed to make ad hominem attacks on people based on what could be their entirely sincere scientific belief. That was not acceptable 20 or 30 years ago. If you walked into a department, even if it had something to do with the environment or human genetics or something like that, people were allowed to have their contrary opinion as long as the arguments they made were rational and supported by data. There was not a sense that you’re allowed to impute bad moral character to somebody based on some analytical argument that they’re making. It was not socially acceptable to do that. Now people are in danger of losing their jobs.

 So how do you think that happened?...

When I started as an assistant professor, the whole atmosphere on campus was different than it is now. And like every complex phenomenon, it’s multifactorial. I could list a bunch of factors that I think contributed, and one of them is that scientists are under a lot of pressure to get money to fund their labs and pay their graduate students. If you sense that NSF or NIH have a view on something, it’s best not to fight city hall. It’s like fighting the Fed—you’re going to lose. So that enforces a certain kind of conformism.

When I started in science, most hard sciences and even the “softer” social sciences, maybe even biology and psychology, were predominantly male. And the whole cultural setting was quite different. Males are much more comfortable with confrontation. Like you and I could have a huge argument and then go out for a beer later. Right? And we could be great colleagues, even though we disagree on some really fundamental issues in our discipline.

Now, this is just my observation, but as the sex composition in these fields started changing, a lot of women found themselves uncomfortable with what could be considered a toxic environment, one where you and I could really go at it.

For example, if I was giving a seminar and you just started confronting me and it got really heated. A lot of women would just be turned off by that. They might even say “I was interested in physics, but those guys are a bunch of jerks. I couldn’t pursue a physics career—I’m glad I’m in data science now.” So we’re really talking about a cultural change that happened with a change of gender makeup in the departments.

I think there’s a male idea that you can be a part of the honorable opposition. You can hold a view that is totally against what you’re supposed to think, but you’re backing it up with real data and real rational arguments. When I entered science, so as long as that was the case, opposition was okay.

But when your department has a different cultural value—collegiality, gentleness, and nurturing behavior— certain kinds of arguments that used to even happen in front of the students are now just not supposed to happen. And when it comes to scientific issues—less so climate modeling but more like nature versus nurture, for example—the argument is often advanced that you’re harming students by showing them scientific theories or evidence that is harmful to their self image. And therefore you just shouldn’t do it. It’s beyond the pale. You could be fired for harming your students.

So safety is above everything, including the truth. It’s been a gradual change, and I have to admit I’m a little blindsided by it. I didn’t realize it had happened to the extent that it happened until a few years ago. And I think you’ll see a very strong gradient where younger academics are much more prone to conformism or being uncomfortable with intellectual confrontation, much more so than the older faculty...

The incentive for me as a senior administrator is not to make waves and keep everything kind of calm. Calm down the crazy professor who’s doing stuff, assuage the students that are protesting, make the donors happy, make the board of trustees happy. I found that the people who were in the role so they could advance their career, versus those trying to advance the interests of the institution, were very different. There were times when I felt like I had to do something very dangerous for me career-wise, but it was absolutely essential for the mission of the university. I had to do that repeatedly...

I was the most senior administrator who reviewed all the tenure and promotion cases. We have 50,000 students here. It’s one of the biggest universities in the United States. Each year, there are about 150 faculty who are coming up for promotion from associate professor to full professor or assistant to associate with tenure. And there are sometimes situations where you know what the system wants you to do with a particular person, but there’s a question of your personal integrity—whether you want to actually uphold the standards of the institution in those circumstances.

It’s funny, because the president who hired me actually wanted me to do that. She wanted someone who was very rigorous to control this process. But I knew I was gradually making enemies. Sometimes there’s a popular person, and maybe there’s some diversity goal or gender equality goal. So you have this person maybe who hasn’t done that well with their research, or hasn’t been well-funded with external grants, or maybe their teaching evaluations aren’t that great, but some people really want them promoted. And if you impose the regular standard and they don’t get promoted, you’ve made a lot of enemies...

There’s something called the College Learning Assessment. It’s a standardized test that was developed over the last 20 years. And it’s supposed to evaluate the skills that were learned by students during college. For less prestigious directional state universities this would be a very good tool, because the subset of graduates who did well on the CLA could get hired by General Motors or whatever with the same confidence as they were able to hire the kid from Harvard, University of Michigan, or anywhere else. So there was interest in building something like the CLA.

In order not to do it in a vacuum, the people who were developing it went to all these big corporations and said “Well, what are the skills that you really want out of a college graduate?” And not surprisingly, they wanted things like being able to read an article in The Economist and write a good summary. Or to look at graphs and make some inferences. Nothing ivory tower—it was all very reasonable, practical stuff. And so they commissioned this huge study by RAND. Twenty universities participated, including MIT, Michigan, some historically black colleges, some directional state universities—a huge spectrum covering all of American higher education.

They found that leaving students’ CLA score was very highly correlated to their incoming SAT score. Well, if you knew anything about psychometrics, it’s no surprise that the delta between your freshman year and your senior year on the CLA score is minimal. So what are kids buying when they go to college for four years? Are they getting skills that GM or McKinsey want, or are they just repackaging themselves?

I showed the results of this Rand CLA study to my colleagues, the senior administrators at Michigan State University, and I tried to get them to understand: “Guys, do you realize that maybe we’re not doing what we think we’re doing on this campus? You probably go out and tell alums and donors, moms and dads that we’re building skills for these kids at Michigan State, so they can be great employees of Ford Motor Company and Anderson Consulting when they get out. But the data doesn’t actually say that we do that.” I’m not talking about specialist majors like accounting or engineering, where we can see the kids are coming out with skills they didn’t enter with. I’m talking about generalist learning and “critical thinking” that schools say they teach, but the CLA says otherwise.

I have all my emails from when I was in that job, so I can tell you exactly how much intellectual curiosity and updating of priors there was among these vice presidents and higher at major Big 10 universities. Now, they could have come back and said, “Steve, I don’t believe this RAND study. My son Johnny learned a lot when he was at Illinois,” or something. They could have come back and contested the findings. Did any of them contest the findings with me? Zero...

There was overall very little concern about the findings, there was very little pushback even denying the findings. Those are the people running your institutions of higher education...

You’ve worked in genomics research, where you’ve blogged about interesting questions like the possibility of intelligence enhancement with things like embryo selection. How does that interact with today’s modern ideological environment and political considerations?

Well, there are people who are really trying to either kill or at least studiously ignore all of this progress in genomics. One of the consequences that I’ve talked about is the specific data that you need to, for example, build up a genomic predictor where you could take the DNA of a person and predict some aspect of that person.

My research group solved height as a phenotype. Give us the DNA of an individual with no other information other than that this person lived in a decent environment—wasn’t starved as a child or anything like that—and we can predict that person’s height with a standard error of a few centimeters. Just from the DNA. That’s a tour de force...

“Well, since you guys showed you could do it for height, and since there are 30, or 40, or 50, different disease conditions that we now have decent genetic predictors for, why isn’t there one for IQ?”

Well, the answer is there’s zero funding. There’s no NIH, NSF, or any agency that would take on a proposal saying, “Give me X million dollars to genotype these people, and also measure their cognitive ability or get them to report their SAT scores to me.” Zero funding for that. And some people get very, very aggressive upon learning that you’re interested in that kind of thing, and will start calling you a racist, or they’ll start attacking you. And I’m not making this up, because it actually happened to me.

What could be a more interesting question? Wow, the human brain—that’s what differentiates us from the rest of the animal species on this planet. Well, to what extent is brain development controlled by DNA? Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could actually predict individual variation in intelligence from DNA just as we can with height now? Shouldn’t that be a high priority for scientific discovery? Isn’t this important for aging, because so many people undergo cognitive decline as they age? There are many, many reasons why this subject should be studied. But there’s effectively zero funding for it.

So this brings us to a larger question, which is the relationship between science, scientific authority, political authority, ideology, power, and funding. In your view, what makes for the healthiest relationship between science and politics?...

If you can’t find anybody who disagrees on either side of an issue, maybe there’s something wrong with that field of science. Maybe the people who disagree are being forced to pay such a huge penalty that they stopped saying anything. And I think that should make you less confident of the claims coming out of that sector of science.

One of the things that I teach in the tech startups that I’m involved in is that you never want the point answer without being given an uncertainty range. For example, if I ask about how many units we are going to sell next quarter, and the guy says, “My model says five million,” an additional estimate of uncertainty, together with the central point estimate, has enormous value. It’s a 2x if he says, “Well, it could be five million, but 95 percent confidence is anywhere between one and nine million.”...

Anybody who’s done mergers and acquisitions at Goldman knows yeah, you’ve got to talk that way. The word conviction is used all the time in finance: what’s your conviction? If you tell them “high conviction” and it’s wrong, they’re going to fire you."

 

Of course, I see people being slammed as climate change deniers for talking about the flaws with current models and clouds

Trust the "Science"!