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But while the excuses are more obvious, when the researchers in question are sure that they aren't going to have the actual facts proven or even provable, and certain that certain politicians might flip their lids, but not that much more obvious. On the specific matter of COVID, a certain personality will point to the coincidental last-minute delays in vaccine approval, but it's not like COVID is the only research question with massive pragmatic questions. On politics, one doesn't have to think long before coming up with a long list of political matters like educational theory, environmentalism, public safety, countless others where tens or hundreds of thousands of lives quite likely rest -- sometimes, in the modern courts, cite -- individual papers. It's not even as though Nature, specifically, has otherwise avoided making public positions based on their pragmatic and political aspects. Doesn't even have to be political or even the sort of matters that drive the Culture Wars: research often matters because it could have so broad an impact.
The ethical ramifications of intentionally fudging things would be mind-boggling, of course! And there's no way to prove the internal motivations of a man, even assuming he or she knew it to start with. There's certainly been a long and unavoidable history of popular or 'obviously right' claims being subject to far less scrutiny than needed. But there's something worse, deeply and critically and baldly worse, where this crosses over into intentional behavior. To borrow from McArdle, once you've persuaded someone you're willing to tell them anything to win, you've lost the ability to persuade them of anything else.
((And, while it's possible that the people providing this data have carefully excised any exculpatory considerations otherwise, there's nothing yet showing even the slightest introspection on the matter of public trust. Sure hope that undermining any level of scientific honesty doesn't have costly side effects!))
Even worse still, there's the possibility that even if the "Proximal Origins" authors were factually wrong -- still not proven! they could have been right by accident! -- they weren't exactly wrong about this being science-as-usual. The paper was ghost-written by an author who used his 'remove' from the publication to burnish its and his credibility, with preconceived result and a thumb being aggressively applied to hurry review? Well, "preconceived notion" is just an uncharitable way of saying, there's always a little bit of Kevin Bacon problem in reviewers for smaller fields, and that Nature bit about ghostwriting was more about aspirations than specific standards. There's no rule against using non-public information to make accurate 'predictions' after-the-fact, so long as you avoid preregistration requirements. Favor what would be nice if it were true? Well, if you aren't publishing data disproving it side-by-side, what's the problem?
Nate Silver points to his early disagreements with KG Anderson as signs that it's possible to notice extreme partisans, but a) very few people did, contemporaneously, and b) even now, quite a lot of people Silver wasn't getting into Twitter Tiffs with are defending the conduct here. And Anderson was only one of the bullshitters. What happens if it doesn't need WWIII, or Korematsu II: Electric Boogaloo, or Trump's Revenge?
Lastly, this... hasn't exactly come across as a highlight of civilian governance, so much as a bunch of scenes from the blooper reel. Anti-Fauci partisans have been regularly pointing to ties between the several high-profile individuals here and vital grant institutions that they Tots Weren't Under The Thumb Of, but Andersen's testimony here is an absolute mess, with a large portion of his claims directly contradicted. It's not like we ever prosecute real people for lying to Congress, and that "knowing and willfully" bar can be a pretty high range to hit anyway. But in many ways that's missing the trees for the forest: these releases paint almost the entire field as an incestuous mess. That's most overt on a partisan level, where it looks like they could have locked the entire field's more conservative branch into a single broom closet without removing the brooms, and tried in every sense but the literally. But you have an official NIH prohibition on funding of gain-of-function research, which in practice got so many exceptions and cutouts and narrow definitions that it's the punchline to the "it's only X if it's from the Y region" snowclone. There was a big press release about the US funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology a week ago, continuing on a pause dating back to 2020, which would be a lot more impressive if I had more trust regarding a certain Alliance that had funded them in the past.
Normally, I'm libertarian enough to enjoy when a private individual's response to Congress is a slightly more polite 'sit on it and spin', but few if any of these individuals are private actors by any meaningful sense of the word. Hence why much of this could be FOIA'd, and much of the remainder are so heavily funded by grants and indirect subsidy that they honestly should be. I've given my rants before about other government sectors that have flipped the bird to attempts at oversight, but at least with the FBI everyone paying attention knew that we had a police agency that had jurisdiction over its own Congressional oversight; when talking the NSA, the whole classification and natsec issues were public at the time, even if they were lying to our faces. Nor is the problem here limited to merely Congressional oversight; the NIH is at least theoretically under the executive branch, and it's not clear the early-2020 Trump administration would have cared or even disagreed with this manipulative tactic, but just in case, the Trump-appointed director of the CDC, an early proponent of the lab leak theory, is pretty heavily cut out of the loop from any of these discussions and the paper was used at length to paint him as a nutjob. Even beyond the general issues with judicial review, trying to bring anything related to this matter into a court would be incoherent.
Virology experts as a fourth estate? Or is that closer to fortieth?
It's more like Scientists as a fourth estate. Scientism has rushed in to fill the void of a lack of religion and faith, which is ironic because science is supposed to be above all that. Unfortunately once you turn science into an ideology/religion/cult whatever you want to call it, it loses the vast majority of its explanatory power.
Maybe we'll see a 'fundamentalist' turn in science, where scientists insist we have lost the true path and return to our roots.
I don’t see how that can work when access to academia in general and science in particular is completely gate-kept. If you’re not working for a university or the government, you don’t count, and therefore your criticism won’t be heard. So it’s a self-protection thing. Only people sold out enough to the system can get enough power to criticize the system.
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