Negative Metascience

I was inspired recently by an offhand joke from Jordan Dworkin that a major new cause area for the progress community could be metaparascience — the science of parascience. 

This is very funny. Valid research questions in such a hypothetical field might include: “Why is progress in cold fusion slowing down?” or “What defines research productivity in the community of UFOlogists?” or “Are groundbreaking bad ideas getting harder to find?”

There’s also an important point to be made here. Metascience and progress-aligned organizations are — not surprisingly — oriented towards building a better future. They tend to focus on how to reform institutional decision-making and research to increase output, improve organizational effectiveness, and make scientific breakthroughs more likely. 

In other words, the progress community is focused on a kind of positive metascience that asks simply, “How could we be improving things to drive progress faster than what we have now?” 

The thing about positive metascience, though, is that it is hard. The truth is that we don’t really know how major scientific breakthroughs come to be yet, not in a way that allows us to create repeatable processes for producing them. Designing and executing careful RCTs around science is very challenging, and success on the things that matter is hardly certain. Ensuring that all the multifaceted conditions are right for accelerating progress may necessitate the slow, painstaking work of forging wholly new institutions, research paradigms, and professions. 

While how to rev up the engine of science is still unclear, the world is full of striking examples of the kinds of dynamics that inhibit progress. For instance, rigid research orthodoxies appear to have inhibited progress in addressing Alzheimer’s. Market failures in testing and evaluation played a role in slowing the development of mRNA vaccines. 

This offers a different path. Metascience can succeed not necessarily because it is able to once and for all unlock the secrets of innovation and technological progress, but simply because it is able to inhibit corrosive patterns in scientific institutions and processes.

This is a kind of negative metascience: what can we prevent or eliminate to preserve and accelerate progress? This is no small thing. Achieving even the same scientific results at half the cost would represent a massive gain to society. 

Granted, there are areas where a positive and negative metascience agenda converge. Reforming grant processes, for instance, often requires the removal of strictures on how funding decisions are made. Experimenting with new mechanisms for incentivizing academic researchers may imply throwing out many of the rules constraining them within a university. 

But taking up a negative metascience agenda also focuses us in new directions. For one, we should start taking metaparascience quite seriously: not necessarily as the study of progress in parascientific or pseudoscientific areas of research, per se, but more as an exploration of why parasciences grow, become influential, and fall out of favor (or not). 

We need a series of rigorous case studies in this area. For one, these investigations would teach us a great deal about how scientific communities are shaped and influenced by the movements that aspire to credibility at their fringes. No account of metascience is really complete without, say, a keen understanding of the success and evolution of movements like those around trauma. These are critical to understand, since these movements routinely compete with scientific institutions, modify their agendas, and in some cases can capture them entirely. 

For another, these case studies provide lessons that are likely to be useful to understanding science more broadly. UFOlogy has never entered the scientific mainstream, but its demonstrated ability to survive and thrive through decades of public skepticism can teach us something about how research fields in general can remain robust against contrary evidence, for better or for worse.

Finally, negative metascience may also become more important to the progress community as the number of thinktanks, funding organizations, and FROs it gives rise to continues to proliferate. If these new institutions are in it for the long haul, it will not just be about doing science better, but ensuring that they are themselves robust against the very same forces that have inhibited progress among science incumbents.