The tragic times we are going through remind us of the crucial importance of science (where would we be without vaccines…), but also how fragile and constantly threatened this conquest of rationality is.
In this vast and complex issue, education, the media and popular science popularization – as fortunately a lot is done in our country – play, or at least should play, a decisive role: that of ensuring that everyone can receive and understand scientific information, and can distinguish between what it is reasonable to think that one knows, what one does not know and what is uncertain.
Many obstacles stand in front of us.
Politics, to begin with, can, as the chief scientist of Quebec, Rémi Quirion, recently reminded us, confuse the issue and harm the necessary transparency of communication between experts and the public, which requires that we sort out what comes from one and what comes from the other.
More subtly, ideology, in the broad sense, can also be an obstacle to communication, and even to scientific research. In this regard, we know the distressing effects of relativist and postmodernist beliefs in vast sectors of intellectual life and the university.
Sometimes, however, what happens is unexpected. See instead.
Michael Shermer and Scientific American
I have long been an avid reader of popular science journals. Among them, the prestigious and very old Scientific American.
When I was younger, I rushed to the last issue to read the one I consider to be one of the greatest popularizers of science, but especially of mathematics, of the XXand century: Martin Gardner (1914-2010).
More recently, another very big name in contemporary skepticism has been chronicling it for a few years: Michael Shermer, also founder of the journal Skeptical. It was on his column that I launched myself when I received the magazine.
Then, suddenly, after 214 chronicles, it stopped, in January 2019.
Shermer recently explained what he believes happened. In a word, it was not enough woke for the ideological positions that in his opinion the journal now defends.
This disturbing episode, to be placed among the ideological threats against science and rationality, has not, I think, been reported here. However, it deserves your full attention.
University fraud factories?
Another major enemy of science and reason, also known for a long time, but which nowadays takes new forms, is the commercialization of knowledge and research.
When I was editing Chomsky’s writings on the university, he assured me in an interview that in many ways research at MIT was freer when it was funded by the military than since it was. massively by private enterprise!
The pernicious effects of money on the production and dissemination of science, well known (determination of research objects, appropriation of results, patenting, astronomical costs of institutional subscriptions to journals, etc.), are currently taking on which we would not have suspected until recently.
I have already spoken in these pages of these so-called predatory journals which, for real money, very quickly publish, in what has all the appearance of a legitimate scientific journal, texts which have not been evaluated by peers. and who sometimes talk nonsense.
It seems that this distressing phenomenon is increasingly known and decried, which is an excellent thing. But it would also seem (note this conditional…) that the circumvention of publication validation processes has recently taken a new turn. I don’t know how accurate this report is, but this troubling file should be researched by people who have the time, skills and resources.
Here’s what its about.
Anna Abalkina, a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, is a specialist in university fraud. In a recent publication, she argues that there are now veritable college fraud factories, thriving and generating significant revenue.
According to her, academics would turn to companies such as International Publisher LLC in Russia (there are also some in other countries), which offer them the possibility of becoming co-authors of a manuscript already accepted for publication by a journal. These articles are said to be written in Ukraine and use plagiarized materials from doctoral dissertations or academic journals written in Russian and then translated into English, making them difficult for plagiarism software to detect.
It identifies 303 problematic articles, and the sums collected by the fraudulent companies would be considerable. Among the disciplines involved are economics, law, education, linguistics, medicine, engineering and agriculture.
Michael Shermer, who knows these files well, must be aware of all this. But we won’t read about it in Scientific American…