How to prevent another scientific great leap forward

Many of the key Australian decision-makers appeared to be hospital administrators. Where were the health economists who understood economies can’t be run like hospitals and that there are cost-benefit trade-offs to be made?

A refinement on this would be to have “red and blue” teams, as used in the military and cyber security, where you have one team making the decisions with the other challenging them—an approach that institutionalises a devil’s advocate approach to lessen the dangers of group think.

There should also be a more nuanced interpretation of what a “state of emergency” constitutes, as it was used to lock down not only populations but debate: in parliaments, the medical professions, the media, and the community.

Science is not settled

Governance is only part of the picture. There is plenty of evidence that science has become corrupted by “the science,” which is a non-scientific adherence to an alleged consensus. It occurs in any area where science intersects with politics.

Even if there is a consensus, science is not consensus and is, in fact, full of examples of where the consensus was wrong.

Worse, we have trouble knowing what is correct.

John Ioannides is the author of a 2005 paper “Why most research findings are false,” which has been downloaded three million times—surely a record in academic publishing. It describes what is known as the “replicability crisis.”

It turns out that a huge number of even some of the most significant scientific studies cannot be reproduced, even by the person who originally did them.

This needs to be fixed. There are a number of points where this can be done.

One is to fix the publishing process. Peer review is a farce and is often used to stop novel information from being published. Researchers are rewarded for making discoveries, not disproving them.

Open publishing is one solution to the publishing problem, and just as company accounts are audited, there should be a career stream for scientists auditing the findings of others.

Another issue is that fraud is obviously a factor in some of these situations, but when was the last time a scientist was jailed or fined for taking money under false pretences?