Meta Morsels 1

A selection of new and notable writing on metascience

This is the first of an occasional series of posts providing tasty tidbits to anyone with an appetite for research on research. We aim to offer a varied buffet with academic papers, essays, blog posts and other thinkpieces. The thinkier, the better! Enthusiastic readers are welcome to send us links to articles that have stimulated their metascientific juices and we can add them to the menu in future posts.

Daniel Hook: Human friction in the age of "decollaboration"

First up, Daniel Hook, who until recently was CEO of RoRI Partner Digital Science (and is now Chief Scientific Officer for the parent company Holtzbrinck) reflects in an essay on the experience of taking a driverless cab to see a colleague he has travelled half way around the world to meet. Though he is an introvert who enjoyed the convenience of not having to engage in small talk with a taxi driver, he recognises the value of the friction of human interactions that, even as AI threatens to take over the scientific world, remain a necessary part of any creative endeavour.

“Research is not merely a production function that converts ideas into papers. It is a community of practice – a social fabric maintained through argument, apprenticeship, conference-bar conversations, the shared ordeal of a difficult referee report. That fabric is woven from precisely the frictions we are now engineering away. Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn. No individual thread matters. The fabric does. There is a word for what happens when this proceeds at scale, and I propose we use it: decollaboration.”

Henry Farrell: Why social science must resist simplified AI narratives

Amid the endless cacophony of public discourse around AI, one of the sanest voices belongs to Henry Farrell, Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. In a recent post on his Programmable Mutter Substack, Farrell asks “How should social science think about AI?” His thoughtful answer will likely also resonate with anyone asking how metascience should think about AI. Farrell argues that those trying to understand the likely impacts of AI could do worse than attend to the writings of sociologist, political scientist and historian, Charles Tilly, who argued that social science too often remains hobbled by narratives and power structures that fail to capture the very real complexities of the modern world.

“Even if Tilly’s methodological hobbyhorses aren’t yours, I think that two elements remain important. First - that social scientists should not get caught up in simplifying narratives. In particular, they ought ignore both the soothing suggestions from modernizers that our history is an ineluctable path from past chaos to future order, and their intellectual adversaries, who hark back to some imagined past era of organic harmony before the steam engine, electricity and flush toilets ruined everything. Past, present, future - all are far messier and murkier than our abstractions suggest, with lots of different processes happening at once.

Second, that social scientists ought pay a lot of attention to struggle and power. People disagree and fight - the variable processes that drive change are not smooth and technocratic, but the consequence of their collective struggles with and against each other. And some have much greater power than others to shape their fates and the fates of those around them.”

Christopher Smith: Why science policy needs context over metrics

Finally, on his blog, Christopher Smith, Professor of Ancient History and Executive Chair of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, suggests that we consider our ways of appreciating fine art as a guide to formulating science policy. Along the way, he muses on the importance of remembering context whenever we feel seduced by the false promises of objectivity that data and metrics too often dangle in front of our faces.

“The proportion of spend on context is what suffers when your sole metric is economic growth. And the contribution of context to success is intangible. The culprit is measurability, that fetish of the contemporary world. Despite being awful at statistics, and despite the implausibility of proxy measures used in so much analysis, the public sphere has convinced itself that a data point trumps a deep description, a graph is more reliable than a graphic illustration or indeed a graphic novel. But we need both. We need the ability to critique images and to understand the maths. We need surveys but we need stories. And above all we need context.”