Sept. 7, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:45
4186 Science's Replication Crisis | Peter Ridd and Stefan Molyneux
▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterDr. Peter Ridd is the former Professor of Physics at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia – and was fired after a battle with the university authorities after a controversy involving his research into the “Great Barrier Reef.”Peter Ridd Legal Defense Fundhttps://www.gofundme.com/peter-ridd-legal-action-fundYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I hope you're doing well. I am here with Dr.
Peter Reard. Now, he is the—and we're going to explain why and why it's so important—tragically, the former professor of physics at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.
He was fired after a 300-style biblical battle with the university authorities after a controversy involving his research into the Great Barrier Reef.
Now, we're going to get to that research in a few minutes, but first we're going to talk about, well, the fact that we both love science, but it would appear— That there are other people in the scientific field who don't love what I would call traditional science with quite the same fervor.
Yes, I mean, that's definitely true.
I think we've got this thing called a replication crisis, which is not well known by most people in the general populace, but we're finding that about 50% of, when you actually test science, recently published science, you're finding that roughly about 50% of it has Either serious flaws or is plain wrong.
Now, this is actually, you know, it's a terrible situation we've got into.
Now, we're not talking about, say, Newton's laws of motion and, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity.
These are dead solid.
You can state your life on them.
In fact, you do state your life on them.
But some of these other sciences not.
And the problem then comes to when other scientists don't face this reality.
Because if you're not facing reality of the unreliability of it, then you're not a friend of science, in fact.
Well, and this question of reproducibility is one of the foundations of the scientific method.
I mean, people experimenting with things have been going back since the beginning of time.
I guess it was experimenting with rubbing sticks together gave us fire.
Our modern livestock is the result of lots of tinkering with breeding and so on.
But the modern scientific method has reproducibility as one of its central foundations.
That if I say I have fusion in a bottle, you have to be able to follow the steps and reproduce all What's going on?
Otherwise, it could be a mistake.
It could be error. It could be fraud.
It could be some conflict of interest.
As you point out, in Australia, over the next couple of years, the Australian government's going to spend a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef.
Well, if I remember my time in the business world, I did remember meeting just a few people who might be tempted to tinker some stats for the sake of getting their hands on that kind of money.
That's right. So you've got to be dead sure of it.
You mentioned fusion in a bottle, which was, of course, a classic example of where some people said, oh, we've made fusion in a bottle.
Well, what's the first thing that then other groups did?
They tried to reproduce and it failed.
You know, it's not a big problem that the first group made a mistake.
What would have been a problem is if we then spend a billion dollars on something which was never going to work.
So you're right, replication is utterly the basis of all science.
And when science is going to be used for engineering or for commercial stuff, in fact, people do always test it because otherwise they're going to lose a lot of money.
The difference comes to when you're looking at science that's being used for public policy.
What tends to happen then is the governments, for some unknown reason, just believe one group of scientists that this is all right without subjecting it to much more scrutiny than This thing called peer review, which your listeners may have heard of.
And most people think peer review is when maybe a dozen scientists pour over some work for a month or so.
And it's not, in fact.
It's usually a quick read by a couple of scientists who are anonymous.
They could be your enemies. They could be your friends.
And it will quick read for maybe only just a few hours.
And that's peer review. And on the basis of that, you might be going to spend a lot of money, a lot of public money.
And it's just not good enough.
It's not good enough quality assurance.
Well, that is one of the most frustrating things, because I've heard a billion times, well, where has your work been peer-reviewed?
My work has been peer-reviewed?
Like, it's some absolute gold standard of, like, ba-dum, you know, a stamp from the god of science that everything is on the up and up, and...
I mean, a couple of hours, good heavens!
I mean, that's not peer review, that's proofreading, at best.
Because what you want to do is you want to get the source data, you want to try and replicate, you want to go through the notes, you want to interview the person, you want to go through the whole thing to find out whether or not the conclusion that is drawn is something that is...
I mean, I hate to say true because valid or at least in the approximation of true.
But this, yeah, you know, this squinty thing, you know, looks good to me.
I mean, that can't possibly be science.
And that's something in the free market.
If you had your own money at stake rather than this magic mountain of government money, if you had your own money at stake, as you point out, like you wouldn't spend a billion dollars to develop a pill just based on a skimming of some article and no examination of the source data and no attempt to reproduce the steps.
Absolutely. And, you know, you're quite right.
People say, oh, this has been peer reviewed and it sounds so impressive.
And scientists have conned almost the whole population to thinking that it's more than what it is.
And yet it is more than just a proofread, but it's not much more than a proofread.
And as you said, you've got to actually get another group to try to replicate it in the laboratory or go out into the environment and measure the Great Barrier Reef, which is what I've been working on, and just to see whether you get the same result.
But just to have a quick read and not have time to go through the data, you know, this is just not good enough in terms of quality assurance.
It's just as simple as that.
And what amazes me is that even though I've been saying this for quite a while now, there's still most of the scientists, at least the environmental scientists, are putting up an objection.
They're saying, no, no, you're wrong.
There is nothing wrong with this science.
Even though we know that in other areas where we've tested it, half of it is wrong.
And we know that peer review is not good enough.
And I've demonstrated that a lot of the Great Bowery Reef Science is just utterly wrong.
But they still maintain this fiction, and I just cannot understand it.
Well, this is the funny thing, which is, just try to picture, you know, let me take everyone on a tiny mental journey, but try to picture some other field of human endeavor, where a catastrophic 50% failure rate would be A-OK! You know, like you phone up your investment advisor, it's like, you know, half of our investments have gone completely tits up, or, you know, in the car factory.
Well, only half of the cars explode when you turn the ignition, so...
Half are good, you know?
I mean, like, 50-50, one of these M&Ms is going to make you sick.
The other one is probably, like, in what other conceivable field would a 50% failure rate for very expensive stuff that, it's not just the cost of the experiment itself, as you point out, it's...
How much it influences public policy and how many countless stacks of money are spent on this kind of stuff.
This is stuff you really, really want to get right.
At least have the same quality control as your average pack of candy.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
It's exactly what I say actually in some of my seminars.
Where else would you accept?
And we've been told we've got to trust the scientists and yet we know that 50% of what's coming out recently is wrong.
I'll give you an example. If 50% of bridges fell down, you'd think that would be a problem.
Now, we've had one bridge fall down just recently and it's got all around the world and essentially it's a big deal because bridges basically don't fall down because the engineers know that, you know, they have to be very, very careful.
So occasionally something goes wrong in this case and a bridge fell down.
But we wouldn't accept 50% of all bridges falling down or 50% of airplanes I had a scientist who's been an opposition to me on the Great Barrier for a while, and he said peer review is the same quality assurance method as what we use in the aviation business to make aeroplanes.
And you think, he has to be joking, you know.
Can you imagine if I invented some new metal alloy that could go in an aero engine, and I said to Rolls-Royce or General Electric Aero Engines, you can use this in your engine right now because it's been peer reviewed.
They'd just laugh at you.
They'll subject that to 10 years of torture testing before they allow that to fly in an airplane with passengers.
So I just recently came on a speaking tour of Australia, and the media was in a little bit of a frenzy, but none of them wrote and said, well, we shouldn't be too concerned.
There's only a 50-50 chance he's going to make it all.
On the airplane, it's going to break up in midair.
It's going to get hit by a satellite.
Giant crock and tentacles are going to come out of the ocean and yank down the wings.
I mean, everyone's like, the big problem is the plane's going to work for sure.
So we can't count on the plane crash to have him not come here.
And nobody thinks that way, yet with science.
Which is one of these, you know, white-coated, you know, the horn-rimmed glasses, the pocket protectors, the whole air of objectivity.
It feels like that is the stuff that is kind of breaking up the credibility of the science community at the moment.
It's not so much that there are errors, it's just that there seems to be a singular lack of panic about those areas and a singular lack of concern and focus on trying to find ways to reduce this catastrophic error rate.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, it's one thing to have a problem, it's another one to totally deny it.
Now, you know, obviously so much of science, especially the stuff that's come down for a long time, that's just been tested, checked and replicated a gazillion times, it's totally, well, it's as reliable as you can hope to be.
But some of this new stuff, especially the slightly softer, the environmental stuff, Yes, it's not.
But to not actually accept you have a problem is actually inexcusable.
You can never excuse that.
The guys, as I said before, who thought they had fusion in the bottle, it's okay.
They made a mistake. We actually now know what they did, and it was sort of a very excusable mistake.
We then tested it.
It's all okay now.
And if there's bad science out there, bad results, because it's not science until it's been checked, tested, and replicated by the time, if there are bad results out there, And they get trapped out and found to be wrong, that's okay.
And it's not particular, though it is certainly localized around the environmental sciences have so much public policy hanging like an inverted pyramid off a very small data set sometimes.
It happens in the softer sciences, I think sometimes the data is even worse.
Like they try to replicate the famous psychology experiments and boy, they don't seem to do very well at all.
There are now questions coming up about...
Some of the Stanford Prison Experiment, now it's being referred to as an experience rather than an experiment.
And a lot of the foundational truths or foundational stories, I guess, that turned out to be stories that we have, even in the softer sciences, or perhaps especially in the softer sciences, are falling apart even faster.
Absolutely. I've been told, I'm not sure if that's actually true, but in psychology, the amount of psychology research that is actually correct...
It's not statistically different from zero.
So, you know, it's almost completely open.
So, yeah, it's quite remarkable and it's just only a matter of time before the public realise what's going on.
And, of course, this is a disaster because we want the public to have confidence in this.
And unfortunately, I mean, when I sort of started to realise just how bad things were, because I knew they were bad in my field, but I thought the rest of science must be okay.
It's just my field. But when I found, you know, started to read up about this replication process, which has only been talked about in the last 10 years, I actually went into depression.
I was really depressed.
I thought I used to belong to a noble profession that was reliable.
And I've now realized that I belong to a profession that is not reliable.
And unfortunately, I think actually the public actually already feel that on some things.
They know that The engineering science is dead reliable.
You buy a Toyota, it's going to work.
You buy a Boeing, it's going to work.
Do you buy environmental science?
And they're sort of not quite sure about that.
Well, if it's any consolation, Peter, try working in the realm of philosophy and coming up to postmodernists and relativists and subjectivists and, well, we'll do that conversation perhaps another time.
So, now this is important as well because science and the way it impacts...
I mean, there's a lot of theoretical physics that, other than people who like reading Gödel, Escher and Bach and so on, that doesn't really impact much of their life on a day-to-day basis.
But boy, these environmental scares, you know, this constant cattle prodding of the general population with the next environmental disaster that's going to take down the planet and turn it either into Mars or into Venus, but nothing in between.
This stuff has been coming, certainly, you know, since I was a kid.
It's been going on and on, you know, like it was global cooling, then it was Global warming, now it's climate change, and there is, you know, the acid rain, holes in the ozone layer.
I mean, you name it, there has been disasters about it.
Now, with regards to the climate change stuff, that seems to be where there's a lot of concentrated iffy.
I mean, people seem to have a bit of trouble understanding that computer modeling is not the same as science.
That is a very, very different kind of situation.
I remain agnostic about all of the science because it's very complex and so on.
But I have, in my previous incarnation in the business world, did some environmental modeling based on computers.
You know, it is not the same as reproducing reality.
It's sort of like a video game.
It's not the same as actually going into combat.
And I think as people get these successive waves of scares that dissipate, you know, my big concern is, you know, what if tomorrow they say there's a giant asteroid coming towards the Earth?
We've all got to do something about it.
And people are like, eh, the last 12 scares came to nothing.
You know, like this boy crying wolf thing is a big concern, I think.
I think so. It absolutely is a problem.
I mean, in my view, there are serious both environmental problems, which a lot of people have never even heard of, especially in Australia, but even on the climate stuff.
You know, in 1815, there was a huge volcanic eruption that changed the climate for a year or two and caused massive famine throughout the world.
Well, at least in Europe and probably in other areas, too.
We just don't know. And these are things, these are events which we don't know what the return time of them are, but maybe it's every couple of hundred years.
Are we set up that we could actually deal with one of those now?
We're so preoccupied with climate change and the Great Barrier Reef and other things that are we actually set up for things which have been known to have happened in history, not in geological history.
I mean, we're talking about in history.
So it is a problem.
And so if you have a scientific system that's not reliable, then inevitably You're gonna get some bad decisions made.
It's also struck me that for people who follow nutritional advice or try to eat well in that context, man, it's a little bit of a rollercoaster.
When I was growing up, eggs and bacon were bad for you.
Then they became good for you for a while.
I'm not sure what the status is now.
Cholesterol is bad. It really does seem to be a little bit of a grab bag.
Then it's like, oh, well, it's the wheat industry that influenced the food pyramid.
It's just like, oh, man, if I can't even figure out what to put in my mouth, how on earth are we going to figure out what to put in the air or keep out of it?
Yes, exactly. I went through the same thing.
You know, I went over to margarine when I was 20 or whatever, and now apparently it wasn't that bad.
The butter wasn't that bad.
But when you actually look back at that science, you realize that actually it's not that they've just learned a bit more.
They actually drew conclusions when they never should have in the first place, and that was inexcusable.
So, and this is part of the The public's skepticism about science in general, that, you know, everybody knows that almost everything gives you cancer.
Every time you listen to the radio, something new is causing cancer.
And people are rolling their eyes and thinking, you know, I don't know whether I believe this.
So the general public have that sort of cunning that they can smell a dog when they see it sort of thing without knowing about the science.
It's just that it doesn't sound right.
How can all of these things all be wrong with you?
And it's a great shame, because we have to be able to rely on scientists, and unfortunately, we can't in general, or at least in a large fraction of it.
Do you think, I mean, I hate to be reductionist, but also maybe simplicity is genius, but do you think, Peter, that it has something to do with this simple division of public versus private?
That if you don't have your own money, your own skin in the game, that you just aren't going to be quite as concerned with quality And also, of course, when you're chasing public money, you know, politicians, the idea of being able to tax carbon is like meat and drink to them because they can tax just about everything then.
Do you think that it is as simple as that?
Or is there something else going on?
I try not to be too reductionist, but it seems that's fairly close to it.
I think it's certainly part of it.
If governments, you know, it's not their own money.
So, I mean, $500 million to the Australian government, to the prime minister, You know, it doesn't matter.
It's just money. $500 million of Bill Gates is money.
He's going to be really careful about how he spends that.
But it is more than that.
It's not just that.
I mean, a lot of this could be easily fixed.
It's easy to tell whether science has been massively checked, tested and replicated.
You can do it very quickly.
There's no reason why governments can't do that.
Wait, wait, how do you do that? Wait, I don't know how you do that quickly.
Give me the magic wand. Well, you may not be able to test it quickly, but you can tell whether the science that you're using for policy has been tested.
I mean, you can look at, say, for the Great Bowery, where I work, you can look at some of these papers where we're actually, you know, spending some of this billion dollars, half a billion dollars, in just the next couple of years.
You can see, well, where was the follow-up experiment?
Oh, did it work?
Yeah, what was the play-out? Yeah, you can look at this and say, well, all right, we have this, say, for example, Nutrients coming off farms, fertilizers, supposedly causing crown-thorn starfish, right?
It's been supposedly doing this for the last 50 years.
They've been crying about it. That work that that's based on is on one piece of science, which I reckon is wrong because I've actually gone through it in a lot of detail.
And there's some plenty of follow-up experiments which we can do to check whether it's right.
But we're almost deliberately not going to do that, just in case we find it really is wrong.
So you can, governments can look at this and decide that is reliable.
It's been done again and again and again, and it looks like it stands up.
This one, on the other hand, hasn't been done again.
We'd better check it just to see whether it stacks up.
It might take you a couple of years to do that, but you can do that.
Yes, but then, of course, the question is, and this is the entrenched interest problem, which is that, let's say that you say it's agricultural runoff that's causing this, that, or the other.
Well, people set up their stations, they get jobs, grad students get jobs, and very few people work day and night to put themselves out of an occupation.
So who has the financial incentive to come in and find out whether the money is being spent wisely?
Of course, most of the people, you know, if you have a man by the wallet, often his heart and mind will truly follow.
So the people who are engaged in it are probably true believers, and nobody else has a particular incentive to interfere between them and their dream, their desire, their income.
And that's where the balance doesn't seem to occur.
No, you're quite right.
It's good if there is somebody with a financial interest.
I mean, the farmers do have a financial interest in getting this stuff right.
But in fact, there's some interesting politics associated with that.
And the Although the farmers down at the bottom level want the science check, at the higher levels, in fact, the farming organisations are very wary of rocking the boat, otherwise they're labelled as deniers and all the rest of it.
So it's quite interesting, but I still think it can be done.
I'm, for instance, calling at the moment for 1% of this latest $500 million to be spent on quality checking.
For 5 million bucks, it's nothing, right?
You could organise groups of scientists who now have a financial interest because if there's always going to be money available for checking, some scientists can now set themselves up as the checkers.
Like some lawyers will set themselves up as mainly defence attorneys in certain types of cases.
You run it through the Auditor General's department, not through the Science department.
And you can set up a relatively good checking system where, you know, you might have in a country like Australia maybe 50 or so scientists that this is what they do for a living.
And now they have an interest in checking this stuff and holding to account the other side.
What we need to do is have a situation like a court of law where you always have one's a defence, always a prosecution.
Alright, if one group's saying the fertiliser is killing the reef, that's okay.
Now we're going to bring in another scientist to actually Really do a proper peer review.
A peer review the way people think that peer review actually is, rather than what it definitely isn't.
I actually would sweeten the pot a little bit myself, where my signature on the bill, which would be to say that if you find false Science, in something that's publicly funded, you get 10% of the budget for that year in your own personal bank account.
Because that, to me, would be a delightful incentive, a little bit more so than, na-na-na-na-boo-boo, you're wrong.
It's like, you're wrong, and I'm rich!
You know, that, to me, would be a good financial incentive.
But I just put that out as a floater.
Well, actually, it's not a bad idea.
One thing you can do, as well, is that if you put two checkers onto it, so that if one checker finds it and the other doesn't, you say, well, you didn't find that.
We're not sure we're going to employ you next time.
There's various incentives that you can use.
Industry actually does this sort of thing.
You know, if you want something done properly, you don't send your analysis just to one lab.
You send it to a couple of labs and you make sure you get the same result before you accept it.
Right, right. So let's talk a little bit about some of the Great Barrier Reef stuff and then the Exciting pistols at dawn stuff you've been having with the university.
So just very briefly, and this really comes out of the climate science studying that I've done, is that all complex systems that last for a long time have to have built-in correctors in them.
I mean, they just happen. Oh, we have more CO2. Well, that produces more plant growth, which converts the CO2 back into oxygen.
There has to be some balance so we don't do that tipping point and end up with the atmosphere of Venus.
There has to be some way in which these things self-regulate.
I was really quite fascinated to read about this self-regulation adaptation to particular changes in water temperature and so on that goes on In the Great Barrier Reef, because we're constantly told how fragile nature is, and I accept that argument sometimes.
I'm not very good with cannonballs and spears, but nature has a robustness if it's lasted for a long time in a variable environment that's often, I think, understated.
Look, the Great Barrier Reef, at least, is nowhere near a tipping point.
We have a system that is 2,000 kilometres long, well over 1,000 miles long, and along the coastline, the southern half, there might be half a million people, the northern half, there's just a few thousand people living there, right?
It is one of the most untouched ecosystems in the whole wide world.
With regard to climate change, whether you believe that it's caused by man or whether it's a natural fluctuation, I can't think of an ecosystem that's better adapted to changing climates.
The coral actually is, each of the little pot is just a few millimetres across, has got a little animal in it, and inside the animal there's algae that give it its colour and produce the energy for it.
It's a symbiotic relationship.
And it turns out that, well firstly, all the corals that live, or a large percentage of the corals that live in the Great Bar Reef, also live in Papua New Guinea and Thailand, where the water is one or two or three degrees hotter, and in fact they grow faster there.
And the secret that corals have got is that these algae that are actually inside them, that give them the energy, and by the way, that's what's causing them to bleach.
They throw out the algae and they turn white.
And they can die after that.
They don't always die, but they can die.
But they can survive sort of weeks or months through that process, right, if they have to?
Yes, absolutely. That's right.
They can do. But these algae are just floating around in the water.
So when the coral is born, when it's just a little polyp, it brings in this algae from the water floating around.
And it can take in sort of what I call high octane algae, and it means it grows very fast, but it's susceptible to bleaching.
Or alternatively, it can take in a different species of this algae, which makes it grow a bit more slowly, but unsusceptible to bleaching.
So you can see there's a balance here.
Now, so, you know, half a degree or one degree temperature change is nothing for the reef.
I mean, the temperature changes by 10 degrees between winter and summer.
Between the north and the southern part of the reef, you've got one or two degrees at the very minimum.
So when a coral spawns, its progeny doesn't grow up in the same climate necessarily as the parent.
Unlike a tree, it drops a leaf and you'll grow in the same climate as the parent.
When the coral spawns, it could drift a thousand kilometres away where the water is one degree or two degrees hotter or colder.
So these have to be able to deal with massive temperature changes, even if the climate was absolutely steady.
Which, by the way, of course, hasn't been over the last 200 million years that this stuff has been evolving.
Exactly. I mean, four or five thousand years ago, when the Egyptians were around, the temperature was all over the world at one or two degrees hotter.
And it certainly was in the reef.
And that was the heyday of the reef.
There was more coral then than there is now.
Because what's happened is the water level has actually fallen over the last five thousand years on the reef.
It's exposed a lot of the coral to the low tide and the coral has died.
So often you will see pictures in the media of what they're claiming to be dead reef, and it is dead reef, it just died 5,000 years ago.
You know, so there's all sorts of terribly dodgy pictures around about the reef which tell a story which is totally different to what they're actually saying.
It's like that really skinny polar bear that nobody even knows what it was skinny for that everyone was like, oh, you know, pushing those kinds of buttons, vastly, vastly unfair, because it really does goose and scare the population.
I mean, the Great Barrier Reef is a huge treasure, not just for Australia, but for the world as a whole.
And just this idea, oh, it's dying.
And then people saying, well, you know, there was none of this bleaching happening in the past.
And, you know, it seems pretty incontrovertible that there was.
And that just seems like a pretty big statement to make.
Absolutely. I mean, when I first heard that, I just couldn't believe it.
People were saying that there's never been any bleaching before 1980.
You know, there was almost no scientists on the reef before 1980.
Now there's a thousand of them. We've got satellites.
If a coral bleaches out there, we know about it almost before it thinks about it.
In the 1970s and 60s, we wouldn't have known what was going on out there.
I give an example that, you know, bleaching is a fairly spectacular event.
All the corals go white.
But there's also another thing called mass coral spawning, where all the corals release eggs and they form these massive slicks of whitey, pinky material on the surface, which you can literally see from satellites.
Now, that was only discovered in 1981 and 1982, right?
About the same time as we discovered coral bleaching.
So whereas coral bleaching, which kills it, is caused by mankind, Coral spawning is somehow, you know, a wonder of nature.
We discovered them both in the 1980s, but one is caused by, has never happened before, but of course they can't say that about spawning.
It's just ridiculous, some of the comments that the people are saying.
So it seems fairly easy to deal with some of the criticisms around increased water temperatures.
What about the alkalinity or acidity of the water?
That's the one that, of all the threats, that's the one that I think actually has more legs than anything else.
I must say I don't know a lot about it.
On the other hand, if you actually look at the coral growth rates over the last century, they seem to have gone up.
So although that the calcification should have gone down with a slight reduction in the pH, it doesn't actually seem to be happening.
But And remember there's massive changes in the pH, the acidity, well it's not acidity actually, but changes in the pH of the water from day and night already.
So it's not like these things are incapable of dealing with changes in the pH of the water.
It seems incomprehensible.
Again, anything that lasts that long would be so susceptible to death by environmental, mild environmental pressures.
I just can't see how...
And we are talking about very mild in that case.
But of all of them, that's the one that doesn't stack up.
So the other ones are the nutrient one, which completely, in my view, doesn't make any sense.
So this is nutrients coming down the rivers from the farms, causing a growth in basically floating algae.
Cranothorn starfish eat that and they explode in population, they eat the coral.
But actually when you look at that, you know, there's supposedly much more green algae in the water than there used to be.
But when you look at the data, it doesn't look like that at all.
In fact, it doesn't look like it's changed.
And anyway, there's about 100 times more nutrients, this is phosphates and nitrates, released from the seabed naturally than comes down all the rivers.
And also the Great Bay Reef is a massive thing.
It's flushed out very, very rapidly.
So the amount of water that comes in from the Pacific Ocean into the reef system in eight hours is the same as what comes down all the rivers in a year.
So you just do a simple calculation.
This just doesn't make sense.
Right, right. Now, one of the things that I was surprised in reading about some of the conflicts that you've had with the administration of the university...
Explain to me how this concept of collegiality is supposed to work.
Because, call me naive, probably will call me naive, but my idea was that science is a robust argument of data, of causality, of correlation, of criticism, and it's like, you know, the sword goes into the furnace and is ground and you get the sparks and eventually you get the truth, and it's kind of... Punchy.
It should be punchy.
You know, like truth is a hard thing to get a hold of and we need a collective, sometimes combative effort in order to get a hold of it.
And you know, we don't do ad hominems and you know, but we're gonna criticize people where they're awry.
And the idea that you can take foundational criticism out of science seems to me you're taking the science out of science.
And I don't quite understand how rudeness, even if it's there, has anything to do with anything.
No, look, you're quite right.
And by the way, I've never been rude about anybody.
I've been very, very polite, right?
I've certainly taken to task some organisations, but never personal, never ad hominem.
But, you know, say a scientist, the problem with this collegiality, oh, you haven't been collegial, you haven't said it in a nice way.
Let's say somebody does do something wrong and they do make an ad hominem attack, all right?
And they shouldn't do it. But you've got to be able to excuse it because if a scientist is worrying all the time, oh, if I say that maybe I'm not being collegial, maybe I can be fired, then what will always happen is the scientist will err on the side of caution and say nothing.
Look, I've known for 10 years, probably longer, that I've been walking along a cliff edge and sooner or later something was going to push me over the edge.
I've known that. I've known that what's happened to me was going to happen.
Most other people are not in the position that I am to be able to accept that fate.
So if you've got this collegiality, get out of jail clause, we can nail you for anything, basically, which is essentially what it means, then essentially what you've done is you've killed academic freedom because people cannot take the risk.
If you accidentally overstepped the mark, or in my case I didn't overstepped the mark, You will now be done for uncollegiality and you can be thrown out.
You've just killed academic freedom, stoned in by that.
And it seems to me, just to put a sort of analogy on the back burner or the bunny burner, I mean, it seems to me like a crazy psycho bunny boiler girlfriend to say, it's not what you said, it's how you said it.
It's like, what does that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
Oh, you said it. Well, the phrase that you used, this turn of phrase, this approach, it's like, that is a complete distraction from the matter at hand, which is, is millions of dollars of taxpayers' money being wasted?
You know, people work hard for that money.
You know, this is their children's future.
This is debt.
This is taxation. This is serious money.
And if money is being wasted in the pursuit of science that is invalid...
It discredits science, it discredits the government, it discredits taxation, it discredits reason and evidence, and it's a very, very serious business.
And if that is happening, for someone to focus on toad is just, it's crazy to me.
I mean, just perfectly frank, it's beyond crazy.
It totally is.
In terms of North Queensland, where I'm from, where my university is, and by the way, it's the only university for hundreds and hundreds, if not close to a thousand miles.
Every single industry which we have in North Queensland at the moment is massively affected by new legislation that's coming in about the reef.
So the sugar industry, the cattle industry, the coal industry, the mining, everything that goes through the ports, and everybody's saying that the reef is Almost dead is massively affecting the tourist industry.
So this is a serious business.
And what I said was in the light of the replication crisis, that a lot of this stuff is wrong, the peer review is insufficient quality assurance, then as night follows day, if institutions such as the ones up here are only using peer review as a quality assurance process, then we cannot regard them as reliable scientific institutions.
Now, if they think that that's wrong, what should happen is that they should say, no, no, no, Peter, you are wrong.
We do more than peer review.
We do this, that, and the other.
And we can have a debate about their quality assurance mechanism.
So just say, no, we'll hit you with, you know, just in the mail, be dragged up to the dean, given a brown envelope, This is what you've done and now you're going to have to fight for your job and ultimately lose it.
This is no way to carry on when something is affecting the livelihoods of virtually everybody in my region.
And isn't it a fair assumption to make that those who would strongly resist an increase in quality control are not always the same people who are producing quality?
Ah, yes. Well, perhaps there is a correlation.
I'm being as delicate as I humanly can be, but I'm just putting that out there.
Well, look, I just find it incredible that all I'm asking for is better quality assurance.
Look, I reckon there's a lot of problems with the science of the reef.
It can't all be wrong.
I mean, there must be.
I've said that the alkalinity thing is a real worry for me, I think.
But there is a lot of wrong stuff.
And what argument could you have for better quality?
I mean what's the argument against that?
Well, it can't be that there's not enough money for it, because if there's a billion dollars to spend on the reef, why...
It's what used to happen for me when I was a software coder and running an R&D department as a software company.
It's like, well, we've got to produce the software.
We've got to get it out. It's like, you know it's going to take 10 times as much money, time, and resources to fix a problem after shipping as before.
So if we have the time and money to do it then, why don't we have one-tenth of the time and money to do it now?
And that is an essential point that...
It just seems to be missed in the whole world.
Get it right now so you don't waste money because if, as you say, the alkalinity is a problem, you want to have the money, the credibility, the resources, and the data to actually solve the problem and not apply leeches to someone's head who might have a tumor.
No, that's exactly it.
So, you know, there's four major problems.
You know, there's the climate change, the temperature, the nutrients, the sediment, which we haven't talked about, and the change in the pH.
Now, let's just say the nutrient thing is complete.
You don't have to worry about it. It means that now you've got money to spend on the other things.
So if sediment really is a problem, don't spend 200 million on the nutrients.
Spend that all on the sediments because maybe that's where it should go to.
So, you know, there's just so many good reasons, even if you really believe that the reef is on its last legs, which I certainly don't.
But even if you do believe that, there must be, you know, better ways of spending the money if you know, if you've got the science right than if you've got the science wrong.
Well, I think that there may be.
I mean, it's impossible to read people's minds, of course.
But hypothetically, I can see how it could be possible that people don't know what the shape of reef science looks like if there's really, really good quality control.
The shape of it after versus the shape of it before might be so different that people don't really even want to contemplate that kind of change.
No. Look, I think you're right.
But... I think one of the problems with reef science, I might be slightly getting off topic here relative to some of the other areas of science, is that a lot of the reef scientists are a bit emotional.
I got into trouble for saying this.
They're a bit emotional about their subject.
They have an emotional reaction to seeing dead coral.
In the same way as a mother has an emotional reaction to seeing a sick child.
They really do. Now that's a good thing.
That sort of emotional reaction is what caused the 1960s explosion in concern for the environment.
If people weren't caring about that thing, maybe that wouldn't have happened.
But what it does mean is that if you have a group of emotional scientists doing stuff which is not really sort of a hard and fast science, it means you've got to check it much, much more carefully than you otherwise would.
I'm... In the end, there's a full disclosure.
I'm not going to ask about gender, but I'm thinking about gender.
I just wanted to say, I'm not going to ask about it, but I'm thinking about it.
Now, let's talk a little bit about some of the steps that occurred with the university.
I really, really do want to point out, and this will become clear as we have this conversation to the audience.
There's a GoFundMe page, which I strongly encourage you to go and have a look at, because I think the last report I saw you spent like $24,000 of your own money in these kinds of conflicts.
So how did it play out?
You mentioned sort of briefly earlier, but let's get a bit more into the details of the steps that happened, which to me descended into this Kafkaesque, Orwellian scenario relatively quickly.
So what then happened with the university when you published the chapter in the book that criticized some aspects of reef science?
Well, the allegations that were made against me was after I made some comments that I mentioned before, that the institutions were unreliable, essentially.
I was then hit with some misconduct that I was an uncollegial and all sorts of other things.
And I was not supposed to tell anybody, right?
Including, as it turned out, my wife.
I actually asked permission for that and they didn't give me permission.
Can I talk to my wife about something that is profoundly affecting my career and therefore our life together?
No! Yes.
You can't talk to your wife.
It is astounding. They eventually agreed.
To be fair to them, they eventually agreed that I can.
So what then happened was we got legal help.
They then decided to trawl through all my emails to find dirt.
Which they didn't find anything that I'm embarrassed about at all.
But there were two emails to my wife where I'd actually sent some of the allegations to her email address.
So she had it there.
They appeared on Two of another 25 or so new allegations that I had mentioned this case.
So the real Orwellian thing is that they can hit you with these allegations and then tell you you are not allowed to talk to anybody about that, right?
So this is a real problem because it means you then can't call for help.
So eventually what happened was that, well, I needed more and more legal assistance, so we had to go to a GoFundMe page.
We've got all the cash which we need now, so it's all closed.
That was the cause for even more misconduct because I'd let, because if you're going to ask for close to a quarter of a million dollars worth of money, you've got to tell them what this is about.
So I had to put, I had to bare my soul.
These are all the allegations, you know, there's hundreds of pages of allegations against me.
You know, I've got to say it's all there, but by bearing that, by Getting those allegations against me, that was more allegations against me.
So essentially what they're saying is that you can't ask for help.
And if you can't ask for help, You're crucified, both psychologically, financially, legally, and you're finished.
I don't want to say that they're left-wing, but this is a classic left-wing tactic, is to isolate, right?
To build a moat of isolation around people that they're attacking.
And this idea that you cannot communicate...
Any of these allegations to your wife, to anyone who might be able to help you, can't lean on your community for support, you can't.
I mean, that is, to me at least, is a kind of mental torture.
To have you attacked in this kind of way, to isolate you from this kind of help, that is so profoundly cruel, in my view, that it is nothing to do with justice at that point.
Oh, no. I tell you, you sweat when you, you know, because I had three sets of allegations.
The middle one where I found that they'd read through all my emails.
You sweat. You really sweat.
You feel like a hunted animal.
And some of the stuff, you know, I'd emailed one of my old PhD students from way back and said that, you know, that what was happening to me was Orwellian.
I actually said it was Orwellian.
And they read that email and said, you're not allowed to say that this is Orwellian.
So they read your correspondence and say, you've broken the law by saying it's Orwellian.
It's just unbelievable. How dare you call us Orwellian while we're rifling through your emails?
I mean, that's almost like a bad comedy skit from hell.
It is. It's sort of, don't they see the irony in this?
But no. And it certainly is very intimidating.
I mean, you put, you know, it's very easy just to throw up your hands and walk away.
So I feel crushed here.
You're fighting an organisation which has got so much money.
Can we have any chance here where everything is stacked against you?
And this is bad for, you know, this is what our universities have descended to.
And let's not just think that it was my university, James Cook University, that is like this.
I won't say that they're all like this, but most of them in the Western world would have done exactly the same thing.
They've got the same, in Australia, the same what we call enterprise bargaining agreement.
That's the contract between the academics.
And the university, the same clauses are in there.
They would do the same thing.
So this is a university sector-wide problem, not just my university.
And let's be crystal clear about this, Peter, that as far as I could tell, and I'm sure you'll confirm this, There was not one allegation about any fraud, misrepresentation, foundational errors or anything to do with data or methodology or anything like that.
It was tone policing.
It was politically correct hysteria.
It was, don't you dare criticize, to me, a massive infringement on the basic rights of freedom of speech, but nothing to do with the content of your professional career.
No, no, absolutely not.
And you've had more than 100 papers published, I dare say, in peer-reviewed journals.
Okay, forget that earlier part, but it's still important.
So your professional relationships and reputation have been impeccable.
None of this had to do with anything.
In other words, they're facing a 50% error rate, but the only problem that they have is with the person saying, hey, there's a 50% error rate.
You know, that is astounding.
That's right. I mean, I don't like to blow my trumpet, but I guess I have to a little bit.
You know, I was a very, I am a very good lecturer.
You know, I was regularly, I teach physics, and this is not an easy thing to teach, especially to the lower level students.
I was regularly brought in there to teach these big classes of people who hated physics, because I could do a good job.
We invented, well, me and my group invented the instruments for measuring long-term time series of sediments on the reef.
We've been doing this for 25 years.
We've brought in a lot of money from From outside sources, and we still do, well, I should say, you should use past tense.
We did. So it wasn't like there was some problem with me as an academic.
I was a heavy hitter, but yep, I overstepped the cliff.
I knew it was going to happen, and it happened.
To me, the issues around freedom of speech are important because this is not just a matter of can you criticize your colleagues or can you push back against bad or shoddy research and so on.
It is, can you speak...
An honest truth that is very important without being punished.
And that, to me, comes right back down to freedom of speech issues, even if we take into account some of the sensitivities of your colleagues and so on.
It's like, well, do you have the freedom to speak your mind in a professional context?
And even more important, do you have the freedom to occasionally even make a mistake and say something that you shouldn't have said, right?
You know, if I'd said, Oh, this scientist was fraudulent, you know, and which I never said, right?
But if that wasn't the case, and I shouldn't have said it, occasionally, if you're really going to have freedom of speech, you've actually got to allow people to occasionally make some mistakes.
Otherwise, they can't afford to get anywhere near that cliff edge, right?
You must allow people to walk, right, and say what they need to say and know that we will err on the side of, all right, you know, you shouldn't have said it.
You shouldn't have said what you said.
But we know where you're getting at.
We see your scientific argument.
We may not disagree with it, but we're not going to do anything because this is a university.
But if you keep on saying stupid things like that, you're going to do your own reputation in and nobody's going to listen to you.
And that should be the biggest threat that academics should face, not this sort of disciplinary action.
Well, and there is sometimes, it seems to me, Peter, a kind of disconcerting number of lawsuits flying around in academia, even sort of horizontally among academics, that it does seem to be a way to control criticism over and above some of the punishments that might be meted out by the official structures.
Yes. Yeah, I think it's a great shame that these things descend into legal action, but I'm afraid it's become necessary.
Now, no, no, sorry, I'm not actually talking about the stuff that you're doing, which, you know, seems to me perfectly reasonable.
But no, even people trying to, you know, if somebody has a big criticism saying, oh, you slandered me, you know, and there seems to be this kind of stuff that's going on horizontally among scientists.
But let's talk a little bit about what you've been able to achieve, what you hope to achieve, where you are in the process of fighting back against this stuff.
Right, so we've got a court case.
Which will be held in the middle of November, essentially to get my job back with any luck.
We've got a reasonable case there, but the law is not necessarily about right and wrong.
It's about what's the law.
So we'll see how we go.
But in the meantime, I'm also working on this whole concept, the replication crisis, especially as applied to the environmental scientists.
We've got to spend 1%.
My mantra, 1% has got to be spent on quality checking, We have in Australia a thing called the Australian Research Council, which funds a lot of science.
You have the NSF, the National Science Foundation.
The NSF is actually spending quite a bit of money now on replication tests, which they didn't do 10 years ago.
And that's a great thing.
I want that to start to happen in Australia, where governments say, well, this is our policy.
We want to know whether this science is right.
You go off and check that.
So that's my big push.
In addition to, I'm writing a whole lot of stuff on the reef that it's nowhere near as damaged as everybody thinks.
Everybody can get out of the depression.
It will be there in 10 years time if you want to come and see it.
It's bloody beautiful.
It really is. Come and see it.
So that's basically my message at the moment.
Right. And I wonder, though, if this replication crisis continues to roll forward, I wonder how many people are going to be revealed as fraudulent, are going to be revealed as having jig data for – and it may be because of ideological reasons, you know, like the noble lie.
Well, I have to do this in order to save this environmental thing or get people to stop eating baby – It's a great temptation to do the wrong thing for the right reason.
And I just wonder how this rolls forward because if this has been embedded in scientific communities as a whole, and if ideology has trumped integrity, it's going to be a pretty big unraveling moving forward.
And I think that there may be significant numbers of people who really desperately don't want to see that happening.
I think you're dead right.
By the way, it is going to roll forward.
There's no doubt this is going to get bigger and bigger.
The replication crisis is going to become a much bigger deal in the next five to ten years.
But on your point about is much going to seem to be fraudulent, my bet, and it's really only a guess, is that the fraudulent bad science is probably the 1% of it, actually.
Most of it is just not right, that people haven't done it right, and that's actually where most of the problems are.
Of the stuff that I'm aware of on the Reef, and I've published multiple critiques of stuff that I think is wrong, none of it is fraudulent.
None of it... Well, yeah, none of it is fraudulent.
Some of it is, I think, fairly...
I've got to be a bit careful.
No, none of it is really truly fraudulent.
I think people have taken liberties and they haven't been as careful as they really jolly well should have done.
That's probably the first hour game.
But it doesn't mean that it's right.
It still means you can get 50% wrong.
Well, yeah, no, enthusiasm can be a great, you know, the Pied Piper off the cliff.
I know for myself, when I have a really good idea and I get that goosebump of enthusiasm, it's like, that's when I have to be careful, because that's when I'm just like, George, we're going to solve this.
This is going to be great. And you have to be really submitted to a lot of people and push back against it, look for the counter arguments, because, you know, the greater the idea, the more you want to make sure it's not wrong, because then it won't be a great idea at all.
So let's close with this, and I really, really appreciate your time, and I also appreciate when people calm my anxieties about great ecological treasures like the Great Barrier Reef, which is not to say, let's not keep checking it, let's not make sure it's as long-lasting as humanly possible, but... What is your vision of the ideal scientific environment?
Because that has to be something of what it is that you're trying to pursue by going at this replication crisis and trying to reveal some of this stuff.
What is your ideal scientific environment?
What is the vision that you would like people to take away from what it is that you're doing?
It's just that we can guarantee that what is What we're claiming to be science is actually science, which means it has been checked, tested and replicated.
That if people are going to use it, especially for the public, that you can guarantee that it may not be absolutely right, but we've really done our best to really check it.
And it's relatively easy to do.
You know, as I said before, it's not a big job.
One percent of what we spend on science, we could fix this problem.
And that's really all you need.
And by the way, if there was...
Other scientists know that there's this group out there going to check your stuff.
If you produce a paper that's so important, it's going to be used, it's going to go to this mark button.
That's a feather in your cap.
But if it's wrong, now you're going to be exposed.
Huge incentives now to make sure it's right.
And you've almost fixed the problem like that.
No, and that's a very good point, because it's not just the papers you're correcting, it's the papers you're helping to be corrected before they get published because of that concern.
So, I just, at a personal level, Peter, I just wanted to say...
Well, just how much I really admire what it is that you're doing.
And, you know, when those institutions chase after you with, like, mountains of lawyers and, you know, cannons of paper and so on, as you say, it's, you know, it's a little pinprick inducing, it's a little sweat inducing.
And the fact that you took that on in order to be able to speak the truth, in order to bring this kind of correction...
To science is a very noble thing to do and it is a courageous thing to do and people who haven't faced down those kinds of giant institutions may have some inkling but it's a little tough to really get it if you haven't gone through that experience.
I just wanted to say I really do at a personal level have enormous admiration for what it is that you've done and it is the kind of good deed that has ripple effects for many decades to come and I just wanted to thank you for your service to science and reason and evidence.
