The Fallacy of Crowd Sourcing our Science Policy
Mark F. Bregman, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Neustar, Inc.
Today I am in Bangalore India attending a conference. The conference is being attended by folks from industry and academia and a number of students. One of the things that strikes me is the amount of energy being devoted to scientific inquiry by all of the attendees. They all feel this is a critical source of innovation.
In the Bay Area we are lucky to have some of the world’s best research institutions in the world right in our backyard. I am referring not only to the great universities but also to the national labs and other research institutions. With this in mind I was very disturbed to read about Rep. Adrian Smith’s (R-Neb.) call for people to search the National Science Foundation’s database and report on ‘wasteful’ grants. This is part of a larger Republican initiative called ‘YouCut’ which seems to aimed at ‘crowd sourcing’ the job of prioritizing federal budgets.
One of the great strengths of American Democracy has been its representative nature. Individuals are elected by the electorate to concentrate their efforts on governing. Crowd sourcing in this context seems like an abdication of responsibility by those we’ve elected.
Richard Feynman once defined science as follows, “The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth’…. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations — to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.” Feynman also observed, “…there is an expanding frontier of ignorance…things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.”
Rep. Smith’s call is particularly disturbing because it would over turn the current peer review system that leverages experts in reviewing and prioritizing the funding of science and give that responsibility to the ‘crowd’ that is largely uneducated about science and its relation to innovation and economic development. While scientists need to better explain the value of what they do and elucidate the link to economic prosperity let’s not react to this shortcoming by turning over these decisions to the mob. Especially at a time when our most important economic rivals are getting their own act together on science policy.