Uncovering a professional charlatan

A review of my book “What is Science: and Interdisciplinary perspective” appeared in the last issue of JASSS (for a hard copy of the book click here, for a pdf of a similar version click here, for the book review click here). The review is a beautiful example of the working of a professional charlatan and thus, I will present my comment in some detail.

The book “What is Science” describes the scientific method as an unintended human application of the principles of biological evolution by natural selection. That is, it explores the idea that modern science exploits a universal heuristic - familiar to many researchers in artificial life and social simulations - in which random processes, rules of information managements and contrasts with experiments or empirical evidence (i.e. selection) interact to produce scientific progress. One consequence of such a heuristic is that pure theoretical speculations without feed-back from empirical evidence leads to charlatanry (click here for a definition), as was beautifully demonstrated experimentally some years ago by Alan Sokal (see Sokal affair). The above mentioned review of my book is a textbook example of such charlatanry:

Rules of Charlatanry exemplified in the review:

Evade arguments you cannot refute: The review never mentions the core message of the book: that speculations without empirical evidence leads to charlatanry.

You only read parts of the text and then invent, hiding possible lies that serve your argument in trivial but complex sounding phrases:  The reviewer wrote “The reference to interdisciplinarity in the subtitle raises an expectation that the book would integrate insights from various fields that have scientifically studied science: history of science, cognitive psychology, sociology of science, economics, and even recent naturalistic philosophy of science. This is not the case. Jaffe almost completely dismisses any insights provided by these fields”; yet from the 23 main field of science recognized by UNESCO, at least 17 are tackled in the book, including economics to which a whole chapter is dedicated. Most of the disciplines mentioned by the reviewer do not appear in the 2- or 4- digit list of UNESCO Nomenclature (see link), as they are considered part of psychology, sociology or the life sciences, which are treated extensively in the book.

Avoid simplicity; it might expose you:  The reviewer in nearly every paragraph writes phrases like “his simplistic version”, “Jaffe's sketchy account”,”(he) presents extremely simplistic discussion”, etc. He assumes that simplicity per se is bad, but never writes what important aspect was lost in the abstraction. Just keep it general and if possible incomprehensively complex!

Sound sophisticated and polemic, it will stop the reader from trying to dig deeper into your arguments: The reviewer wrote “Furthermore, rather than clarifying the distinction between facts and values, he presents the following view: "ethics may eventually become a discipline which can measure its objects of study quantitatively and which will eventually be able to develop predictable and falsifiable theories." (p. 85) I hope the author just uses the word 'ethics' in a non-standard way”. Definition of ethics and other concepts can be looked up in Wikipedia (click here). JASSS has published, and I hope will continue to publish, papers dealing with ethics. Simulations trying to quantify the effect of virtues such as shame, cooperation, altruism, compliance etc., are of interest to many readers of JASSS.

Focus on what your opponent never said, so that he cannot refute you: The reviewer wrote “(the book) does not describe crucial social practices that make science work (e.g. peer-review), and “...but the author avoids discussing any of the topics that would probably be of interest. Instead of discussing, for example, the role of scientific expertise in a democratic society, he presents statistics…” Clearly discussing peer-review or any other subject might be of interest to someone, yet peer review is not exclusive to science nor an essential part of it. The North American Academy of Arts bases its Oscar awards exclusively on peer-review, but that does not make films awarded an Oscar scientific. Science was and is practiced in many places and historical settings without peer review and peer-review is continuously changing and will certainly change in the future. The role of scientific expertise might be very interesting to some people but it clearly does not help in understanding the working of scientific discovery.

Avoid peer-review:  I could not find any peer-review article in JASSS or in any scientific peer-review journal by the author of the review, but I found plenty of polemic book reviews written by him (I avoid mentioning the review and the reviewer explicitly, as the aim of the charlatan is to increase his citation record by writing offensive reviews).

Charlatans are intelligent: I agree completely with the reviewer when he writes “The chapter four discusses pseudoscience and attempts to characterize typical properties of unscientific thinking. The fallacies are easily recognizable, but Jaffe's ideas for avoiding them are less straightforward”. Charlatans are often very intelligent and eloquent people making it difficult to identify them as such (click here). That is the reason I wrote this text, presenting a few examples of charlatanry and unscientific thinking. More can be detected by a careful reading the book and the review.

All this shows that a description of what is science by natural scientists is all the more important as this endeavor has been a monopoly of philosophers in the past. I am more than ever convinced of the pertinence of “What is Science: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” to anyone interested in science as a healthy contrast to philosophical musings by authors with no practical experience of science. The book has certainly many shortcomings and I would love if anyone would write an improved version of it, or a completely new and better one.

There is an urgent need for healthy discussions of science between philosophers, and scientists from the “soft” and “hard” sciences, but these discussions have to be honest if they are to produce usable fruits. The gap between natural sciences and humanities is real and we are now able to quantify this gap(see: Positive results increase down the hierarchy of the sciences. Fanelli D.  PLOS One 5(4), 2010 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010068; or: Comparing skills and attitudes of scientists, musicians, politicians and students, Jaffe, K., Florez, A., Grigorieva, V. Masciti, M., Castro, I. Interciencia 35(7): 545, 2010. PDF). Bridging this gap is a task JASSS can achieve. We have a long road ahead.