SIO427: Rescuing Science, with Dr. Paul Sutter

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 427. I'm your host Thomas Smith, and I've got such a great one for you today. Can't wait to get over to it. Be speaking with Dr. Paul M. Sutter, a theoretical cosmologist, an award-winning science communicator, and even a NASA advisor, among many other things. Is a delight to talk to, and we're going to be discussing his new book called Rescuing Science. Love science, so if it needs rescuing, I'd like like to hear about it.

I bet you would too. Dr. Paul M. Sutter has identified some major problems with the way we're doing science. And right away, if you're like me, right away my kind of alarm bells went off. Like, wait a minute, is someone coming in and telling us, oh, the universities, the woke universities. No, it's none of that. This is a good faith insider's perspective, perspective on what academia is doing wrong regarding science and how to fix it. Really fascinating. Learned a ton and think you will too.

And we'll get to that in a minute before we do. I you so everyone who has gone over to Opening Arguments. Now that I am back hosting, it's, I can't get over it. It's incredible, as such a long fought battle. You have no idea, but thank you to all who have checked it out. It is, we're making a great show over there now, me and Matt.

And oftentimes Matt's partner, Casey, who has a great perspective, two terminal attorneys, one with defense experience, one prosecution experience, which I think is a very unique thing for a show. So if you haven't gone over to check that out again, please do. Think we're doing really great things and we're only going to get better. Said that, is only doing great things and going to be better as well. In fact, this month, I am so excited for this.

We will be returning for the sort of Seriously Awful Movies. We will be returning to One Mr. Doctor House. Would do that every month. I would it every day because I hate that show so much, but it's also, that wouldn't be interesting. What's interesting is hearing an actual doctor talk about how ridiculous the show House is. And, uh, I try not to go too hard on it. No, that's not true. I do go pretty hard on him, but it's okay.

Even if you like the show, it's still a good time. That's going to be our bonus for this month. I broke my rule of not talking about it until I've actually recorded it. So now that I've said that, someone's going get in a car accident or something. I hope, I hope that doesn't happen, but I'm just so excited. I love, I love doing that Seriously Awful Movies on specifically that kind of thing. And it's going to be great.

So all good reasons, including not having the ads, to pledge at patreon.com/seriouspod. I hope you do so. Thank you to all who support the show. And with that said, let's get on over to the interview after an annoying auto ad for the non -patrons. Sorry. How are you doing today? Oh me too I you sound fantastic

0:03:00 Thomas: It's Oh, it's so nice to speak to you today, um, can't wait to get into it. Very curious to talk about your, uh, book, Rescuing Science, but first, do you mind giving, uh, listeners a bit of a, a personal background, you know, how you got to be where you are.

0:03:00 Paul: Paul Sutter.

0:03:17 Paul: I love long walks on the beach and romantic dinners and gazing out at the night sky. I'm a theoretical cosmologist. I study the whole entire universe for fun.

0:03:23 Thomas: There you go. Oh, that's so cool.

0:03:30 Paul: Yeah, it's amazing. I can't believe I have this kind of job. And I also am very passionate about sharing science and communicating science. So not only do I get to figure out cool things about the universe, I also get to share that with people who like to hear cool things About the Universe. And so I'm a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University, a visiting professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, NASA NASA advisor, U.S. cultural ambassador, because I do some really wild things, and just general, I just enjoy having a good time.

0:04:06 Thomas: Oh, U.S. cultural ambassador because you do wild things. I got to ask more about that. What does that mean?

0:04:10 Paul: Yeah, yeah. So I, my pursuit of science communication, trying to bring science to new and diverse audiences, I love working with artists. I love of exploring topics with artists, co -creating with artists and these explorations to audiences. For example, I work with a dance company here in New York City, Siren Modern Dance, and we developed a performance called TikTok, which explores the nature of time. We came up with the name before TikTok blew up, but it's like naming a kid.

0:04:45 Thomas: Guys, I'm going to make an app based on

0:04:47 Paul: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But once you once you it's like naming a kid, once you make a name for a performance, you can't go back.

0:04:47 Thomas: Our, ah, dang, can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:04:54 Paul: So it's there. It's it's a 45 minute performance set to Mozart. It's a modern dance performance interspersed with narration where I talk about the physics of time. We have been very lucky. We have performed it around the world. And we were selected by the U.S. State Department to represent the United States as cultural ambassadors to perform this at the World Expo. In Dubai. That happened a couple of years ago. And now we're looking ahead to the next World Expo, which is in Osaka, Japan.

0:05:24 Thomas: That is really neat. Do you have like four or five hours to talk about, you know, everything in your life?

0:05:26 Paul: It's wild. Yes, I do. Like I said, I do wild stuff. And I don't know of any other astrophysicist, astronomer who gets to hang out with modern dancers and do cool stuff.

0:05:30 Thomas: Yeah. No, no kidding. I can't think of any in Dubai. I was going to joke that like, Like, oh, is that, you know, there's a there's a diplomat and then you need to show him a good time, like in space or something. But like, kind of, that wasn't like I should have said it because it wasn't that much of a joke.

0:05:53 Paul: I mean, basically, yeah, yeah. It's not far off what we're representing. And this is like, the you latest scientific research and the latest thoughts on dance expression and performance and bringing them together. And this is part of what makes our country so great is we capability to put a scientist in a room and a dancer in the room and they can make something awesome and they can get funding for it, it and then they can share it with the world so that that deserves to be shared, yeah.

0:05:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Depending on which administration is in power. Sure. Yeah. I imagine has to be one that believes that science exists, I think, for that, you know.

0:06:21 Paul: Yeah, you know, you know, some tiny caveat well, that's that's actually one of the main points of my book, which is we need, as scientists and as fans of science, we need to work a lot harder to make sure that no matter who is in office, no matter whose on the ballot box, that that science wins.

0:06:30 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:43 Thomas: Hmm. That's interesting. So, yeah, I'm really interested in your book Rescuing Science. It's coming out in about, it looks like about a month. Is Okay. So make sure if you're interested at any point in the conversation, listeners, make sure to pre -order that bad boy. Do a preferred place people go or is it just Amazon?

0:06:49 Paul: About, yeah. And you can go anywhere you want. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the major booksellers. Autograph copies are available on my website. I sign one and I stick it in an envelope and I send it to you.

0:07:10 Thomas: Nice. Yeah. So in that over, was I really curious because we've covered a lot and I'm sure people are very familiar with, know, you kind of attacks on science and universities and all that stuff stuff from the right wing kind of anti-woke side, but it looks as though you're coming at this from a bit of a different angle. I don't know, you kind of present, what's the central thesis here?

0:07:30 Paul: Yeah, coming from a person who is an academic, who is a scientist, uh, know, funded at universities, has research profession, you know, you know, etc, etc, and who loves science, I cannot tell you how much I love the process of science, the methods of science, I, I teach classes, I geek out on the board, uh, the other day I taught Gauss's law, I'm like, oh, look at this, gauss is law, and my students are like, can, can we go now, it is, I'm so tired, and I'm just like, but it's gauss says law, this is so cool, like, I, I geek out about this.

I love talking about it. And I love the process of scientific inquiry. I love academic research. I think we're dropping the ball. And I think we are ignoring the problems that are rising. And I think when we see, I think we can all agree there is a rise in anti -science sentiment. Although I like to put a caveat to that, as a society used to burn scientists at the stake. So we're not at that level anymore, more. So it is a relative thing. Like overall, we're doing better than a few hundred years ago.

0:07:56 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:34 Thomas: Wait, did we do that as an America or is that, did we burn scientists at the stake? Oh, gotcha.

0:08:39 Paul: We as humanity, you know, the ultimate we.

0:08:41 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, got cha. You.

0:08:44 Paul: It is a relative think, but it is worrying. It is distressing. I do see this growth of the lack lack of trust in science, the rise of anti -science sentiments, and it's so easy to simply blame the other side. It's so easy to look at, like, a die -hard MAGA Republican, you know, or anti -vaxxer, and who's screaming and says, you now, science isn't real, this is stupid, we're not, and it's so easy to say, that person is a moron.

Of course, they're wrong, and science is real, like it's To me, it's too easy to say that because I can't change that person's mind by telling them they are stupid and they are wrong. Never worked on me when someone comes up to me and says, excuse me, Paul, you are stupid and wrong. That has never worked for me. It has never helped me to change my mind.

So what I am trying to do is trying to shake things up, to look inwards and look at how How we practice science as a profession, how we approach society, how we approach the public, and see if there's anything we can change on the inside to make science more trustable and more deserving of respect, and that a shot. Maybe that can help us build bridges to the people that need to hear the scientific voice the most.

0:10:10 Thomas: That's interesting. So a million apologies. I am a little skeptical of this framing for good reason, I think. And don't mind allowing me to kind of go by analogy, I worry a little bit that there can be a bit of a cognitive trap that I think happened with, say, the New York Times, for example, after 2016, I think after 2016 the New York Times, the election, essentially the New York Times did what sounds like the same process.

Now, this doesn't mean that, that point you are bringing up is going to be wrong or anything, but I worry. And I'm just curious what your thoughts on this are. Um, feel like outlets like the New York Times and maybe certain other legacy media saw Trump's victory and said, well, we we kinda, messed up and they explicitly said this, like we need to change the way we're covering stuff. We need to blah, blah, blah. And the idea being, well, there's...

There's kind of a major component of society that, you know, like, like you just said, can't like they're, just tell them they're they're idiots. They we need to engage with them, et cetera, et cetera. And to my mind, what that has done is created worse coverage by the New York Times when the audience of the right doesn't even read it anyway. So it's like they're

0:11:18 Paul: Yep.

0:11:18 Thomas: They're compromising their own, in my opinion, journalistic integrity for the sake of an audience that doesn't read it. And it, don't know if that's analogous. So I just want to put it to you that way. Do you run the risk of, I I totally grasp, like can't we really control or change people's minds in a certain way. So looking inward, I do in general, totally agree with that. But do you risk losing the forest for of the trees? You know, like if, if it's like, okay, uh, in crude terms, if certain factors over here are, you know, 10 % of the problem, but you giant anti -science right-wing machine is 90 % ofthe problem. Do you risk losing that by by, only focusing inward? What do you thing.

0:11:56 Paul: Absolutely. Of course there's a risk. I will not pretend that any of my suggestions will work. I honestly don't know. And like, oh, no, I will go that far because I think in one of the central themes of my book is hubris. And I think scientists, as need to be more comfortable saying the three words, I don't know. I don't know if any of my ideas will work, I don't know, I'm pretty sure, I feel like my ideas will lead to better outcomes. But hey, I'm a scientist. It's okay to not know. It's OK to run the experiment and find out. It'sOK to let the evidence decide for us. So obviously what we're doing is not working. So let's try something

0:12:06 Thomas: Well, you don't have to go that far. Yeah, for sure.

0:12:43 Paul: Else. And you know what? If every one of my ideas doesn't work, OK, that's still knowledge. We've still figured out, OK. It turns out Paul's idea is bad. Those are all bad ideas. And we should stop listening to Paul. Okay, that's fine. I'll just go back to like staring up at the night sky and I'll keep my mouth shut. Obviously what we're doing is not working. It is only creating more alienation and more distrust. So at least, at least if we can try these things and if we can build more honesty and integrity in the scientific discipline, then at least we can sleep at night knowing we tried our best and that we are holding on to our true values.

0:12:55 Thomas: For sure.

0:13:25 Thomas: An excellent point. So So let's get into it. Let's talk about what are some of these problems you want to identify? We're not going to go through the whole book, obviously. People still will have to we go by it. But if you can give us a preview into some of these problems, because

0:13:36 Paul: Yeah. The book, I cover seven different topics and the original structure of my book was structured around the seven deadly sins, by total coincidence, or maybe not, because I listed, I came up with seven areas where I felt like the scientific profession, not like science itself as an idea, as a philosophical pursuit, but how science is done in academic research and how it is connected and plugged into larger society. I found seven issues, and then I was raised Catholic, and so I'm like, like, oh, of course, The Seven Deadly Sins.

0:14:11 Paul: And yeah, it is. And if you read it upside down and in reverse, there's a special message for the kids. Ended up taking that framing away from the book. But the general idea is lack of trust from the public is leading to reduced funding for science. The reduced funding for science is leading to dysfunction. And the dysfunctions manifest in many different ways. One of the ways it manifests is in this publish or perish mentality that dominates scientific research, where I've lived this, this is personal lived experience.

0:14:10 Thomas: That book better be 666 pages. I'm just saying like. Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:49 Paul: I would go as a young graduate student, as a Young Postdoc, I would Go to senior people and say, what do I do to get a tenured faculty position? What do I do? And they would say, write a lot of papers. That was it. That was the entirety of their advice. Um, and so everybody is cranking out research as much as possible. There were over 5 million scientific papers published worldwide last year, 5 million in

0:15:13 Thomas: I don't think I read all those. I didn't get to most of them.

0:15:16 Paul: Yeah. I read, I read four and a half, but then, uh, then I started, I just got a little bit too busy. Not four and half million. I wrote four and a half papers. Uh, people don't even read their own papers. Like there There are co -authors that don't. I'm not kidding. I wish I was because it is really tragic. We are writing so many papers. We can't keep up. We are creating the conditions where fraud, where plagiarism, where laziness and sloppiness just grows unchecked. And there aren't enough checks and balances to counteract it because everyone is too busy creating papers. We're not reading each other's papers. We're not cross -referencing. We're not doing duplication studies. We're not paying attention to our own scientific output. And then to complete the loop, if you were not embedded in the scientific community, it would look like scientists have no idea what's going on. And generally, we have no idea what's going on. That's why it's advanced research. But you get study after study after study, and it's just like this fire hose of publication outputs and they're contradictory.

0:15:17 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah hmm. Yeah

0:16:22 Paul: Some great. Some research is really stupid. Some research is out right fraudulent and fake and they get all mashed together. And so the general public, I believe, doesn't know what to trust. Like when is a statement as a scientist say, you know, fill in the blank. General public I believe doesn't know if that's legit or not. I don't blame them for not knowing what's legit or not."

0:16:22 Thomas: You are speaking our language here on the show and mainly I've come at that from like a science journalism you there's... there's problems all along the supply chain here. You know, because often the study is like we just covered one recently where like often it's the study is fine, but then the science journalist gets the clickbait headline and then that gets shared on Reddit or whatever. And then all you read is the headline, which is like science says eating a grapefruit cures lung cancer or something, you know, and then you read the paper.

0:16:58 Paul: Yeah. Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Yeah. Or maybe kills you.

0:17:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if it's a legitimate one, you read read the paper. And again, coming at it as a non -scientist, but as someone who loves science, I literacy and I do want to communicate to communicate it better. I often ask if we interview somebody who's done a study or if I have a guest who's covering a study, I often asked, what is this effect size and what does this mean? You know, because that's the thing that I think scientists all get. You guys all understand. You're like, oh yeah, okay, I'm going for this effectsize and that means it You you know, the wording that scientists often use around that just isn't geared toward the average idiot like me. Like it's just, oh yeah, it is an effect or something, you know?

0:17:20 Paul: Yeah, yeah. Mm hmm, mm hmm. Yes.

0:17:58 Thomas: Or like a significant effect. And it's like, okay, yeah, I get that. That's, I'm not doubting that that's the way you do things and that's great, but we don't know what the hell that means. Like we don't, we don'T know if that means every single time I eat a grapefruit, I will lose 10 lung cancers or if it means like over the course of a population, if you increase grapefruit consumption by 4% over your lifetime, then like three of us fewer will have lung cancer. You know, it's just, it's impossible to know often. And so there's problems all up and down the supply chain is my point.

0:18:07 Paul: Yep, yep, yep. Yep.

0:18:28 Thomas: But the more in the study end of things, in the actual science, rather than just the journalism and the coverage of it. Something that I'm really interested to hear more about because it's not something that we've covered quite as much. So what do do you think is leading? Uh, so the pressure to publish too much is essentially, you do you that's the main factor here? Uh. Is, are there any other factors?

0:18:49 Paul: Yeah, yeah, like we are publishing too much. We are are rushing to get results out, we are publishing any tiniest little advance, we are crafting an entire paper around, um, I'm, again, speaking from, like like, part of this book is confessional, I've written a bunch of papers that are pretty much useless, like tiny little advances that didn't really need to be published or could have been combined.

0:19:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:13 Paul: But I was trying to get those papers out. That is what every scientist is trying to do. And so this leads to two things. One, you get a bunch of research that honestly does not exactly advance human knowledge all that much. You know, there are so many caveats, or it's so detailed, it's so narrow that the amount of human knowledge gained by that research is almost insignificantly measurable, like it's so tiny, You can barely measure it. Then on the other side of that coin, because we're not only trying to publish a lot, we're trying to published big results that get big citations that get in the big journals like Nature and Science and Cell and Lancet and all the famous journals.

Guess what, we've set up systems in scientific career and advancement, where the more you publish in the Big Journals, the more You Get Cited, the better your chances are of getting advancement and promotion and, know, you private jets and all the other stuff associated with academic research. So we've set up these perverse incentives where we're trying to publish as much as possible, and we're try to inflate our results as much possible to make them big. There is a joke. You know, nature is like the gold standard of scientific publishing. The joke in academia is that nature is where you send all your wrong papers.

0:19:16 Thomas: Yeah. Mm -hmm. Mm. Yeah, really?

0:20:36 Paul: Because nature is the big high -impact journal, they have the highest standards, they're only going to accept papers that make big, bold statements. Most big, bald statements are wrong. They're more likely to be wrong than smaller, more boring statements. And so, yeah, if it's in nature, it's probably wrong. But yeah, that's the one that gets the headlines.

0:20:52 Thomas: -Hmm. Jeez.

0:20:58 Paul: That's the ones that get the attention. And this is like the perverse incentives that we have set up within the scientific community. It's nobody else's fault but our own.

0:21:07 Thomas: Yeah yeah. No, an excellent point and also a depressing one. Uh, What do you, I mean, what do you do about that? Or Or is it just a question of identifying the problem in the first place?

0:21:16 Paul: Know, the first step is calling it out. And this Is slowly beginning to be addressed. You know nothing I speak to in the book in terms of problems or solutions is new. What I'm trying to do is just package it all and show how it's all connected together. And in this case, we are slowly coming around to the realization that maybe we're publishing a bit too much.

0:21:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:39 Paul: Maybe maybe 5 million papers is a bit, you heavy side.

0:21:54 Paul: Maybe would not be able to do that Nobel Prize winning work in the current academic environment because it took me a really long time. And I had to go really slow. And it took be like Einstein took seven years to develop general relativity. No one gets seven years to develop anything anymore. So there to be this conversation, but I think we need to accelerate the conversation and we just need to slow down. Maybe we can tell our grad students, instead of saying you need to publish as much as possible, say, just focus on your dissertation. You know, take your time. Get after one really good result and let that be it. And you know what? If you chase after an idea and it turns out to be wrong, We should publish that, too.

0:21:58 Thomas: Wow. Yeah.

0:22:42 Thomas: Yeah. Well,

0:22:44 Paul: Useful information to know.

0:22:45 Thomas: Must be more than just an attitude thing, right? I mean, there's got to be all the incentives, financial incentives, career incentives. We got to change some incentives, right.

0:22:54 Paul: Yes, we have to change. And the incentives come from hiring committees, promotion committees, grant committees. Of those committees are filled with scientists. I know because I sit on those committees. And we're all scientists just judging other scientists and we're judging them by their publication output. We can just it's it's so weird. It's one of these things where all we have to do is simple, but not easy. We can just decide not to do this anymore.

0:23:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:23 Thomas: Is it a question of like, you know, often this happens in a lot of areas where you just need some metric, metric, you know, though probably each individual scientist on whatever that hiring board is probably knows better, but it's, like, you just need, it happens a lot in government, too. I worked in government my previous life, and it's ,like, you having a number, having an metric is always so much better and looks so much more official, and so something like impact factor and, you now, amount of things published, yeah, yeah.

0:23:48 Paul: More H- index Yes. Yeah.

0:23:53 Thomas: Like, it's just a question of like, because that is the- that- that is the metric that you can look at, that it just kind of gets defaulted to that, or is there some other reason, right?

0:24:00 Paul: Exactly. No, that's exactly it. Like, we uh have noticed that really, really good scientists who do really important work tend to get cited more, so we have made the mistake of assuming that if you are cited more, you- you must be a good scientist. Now everybody tries to publish and cite as much as possible to game. Isn't this called like Goodwin's law or something? Like any metric you use as soon as you decide to use it, becomes useless as a thing of measuring what you're trying to measure. Because now everybody, if you say, okay, we are going to reduce the concept of a good scientists down to a single number.

0:24:17 Thomas: Right. Oh.

0:24:33 Thomas: Interesting. Right.

0:24:42 Paul: And we're going to measure that because we can measure that number. That is something we got. It is hard to quantify what is a good scientist versus a bad scientist. So we will focus on that number, but now everyone just focuses on that member and And so now it's useless as a measure of what is a Good Scientist.

0:24:55 Thomas: They just Game the system, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've heard, if not Goodwin's law, I know Godwin's law, and then maybe maybe you're blending it, maybe it's like the metric of who gets to Nazi fast fast enough on the internet means you've won the, and then people are just gaming that by just going to, yeah.

0:25:05 Paul: I know it's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you end up citing Hitler, then

0:25:17 Thomas: You just go to Hitler right away in the argument, you're gaming that, that metric, and then it's no longer effective at measuring.

0:25:18 Paul: Yes. I'm sure some one of your listeners will correct me. I know it's not Godwin. I thought it was Goodwin. It's something else. There's some other, a

0:25:27 Thomas: Yeah. No, no, it might be. It's just, I think it would be, I was trying to combine them to make another, you know, you often combine laws of nature to make a new line, you know, something like that. So that was mine.

0:25:35 Paul: New law. Yeah. Well, there is, I do have history. There is something called Sutter Law, is if it's interesting, it's probably wrong. And this Applies to scientific results. All it's like, if it's interesting, it is probably wrong. The

0:25:41 Thomas: Hmm. Oh yeah. That's depressing. Yeah. And it's again, this is, you're speaking our language here and it sucks because I do very much want to do a science show where we cover interesting things, but I also am committed to not just doing the feeding into that clickbait headline system, you know? And so often that means that I'm having a scientist on to tell us why the clickbait headline is wrong, which I find really interesting. So it still works out, but it would be much nicer to be able to like, the scenario would be when there's the science headline that's like, wow, that's super cool. If for it to just be accurate, like that would be, because I love good science.

0:26:04 Paul: Schlock. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

0:26:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:23 Paul: And just be done. Yeah, yeah.

0:26:24 Thomas: I want there to be interesting things. What you said about, you know, Einstein, that really bums me out, given that, like, if what you're saying is accurate, that so few people have that time, you could we be missing out on? You know, like what, what could be, uh, there that we haven't really, no one's been able to take the time to discover because they the incentives of the system, they don'T have that timE.

0:26:36 Paul: Exactly. They don't, they don't have the time. Exactly. I wonder about the same thing. It's the same question when it comes to a diversity in science, uh, which I'm very passionate about like there are so many brilliant people that have so many societal disadvantages against them that that they never even show up as an, you know, when we say, hey, we have an open astronomy position, anyone can apply. They're Like, not even getting that message that there is an open position, that there's a career path open to them. And like, how many Einsteins are we leaving behind? Many people? I don't, like, a lot is my guess.

0:26:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's sad, certainly. And it's also the other end of that is, this is something we cover a lot on our other show, where there's woke and talking about kind of this anti-woke culture, which there's so many components to it, but there is certainly, I don't know how much of this is familiar to you or if we're just too online, but like the intellectual dark web crap, and there's a sort of a movement of exactly the kind of people who are on the other end of that. You know, one if there's end of the spectrum is, boy, there's a bunch of people of diverse backgrounds who are really getting screwed over by not not being represented enough. I feel like the IDW and a lot of the anti-woke, at least on the college professor side, are the recipients of that unfair privilege. You know, it's like very mediocre white dudes who are like recognizing that if the gates get open to everyone that they're probably not going to, make you the cut.

0:28:01 Paul: Right.

0:28:10 Paul: Exactly. The argument, I mean, the analogy I like to use when it comes to diversity, which is another aspect of trust, because when you have an entire segment of the population, whether it's like Black Americans or Latino Americans or women who don't believe that science is a valuable career path for them or potential, then guess what? When they are adults, they will not trust science because it's something that someone else does.

0:28:37 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:38 Paul: It doesn't speak to them. And the analogy I like to give is Moneyball. Of some white kid from Harvard who went to college prep and now has a degree from Harvard, of course, his resume is going to look fantastic. And he's going to Look like the prototypical fantastic scientist. And then you give them a tenure track position, they get tenure, and they become a scientist. And then once all the privileges go away and they just have to fight for grants like everybody else, they turn into pretty, you know, mid scientists. Like maybe some of them are excellent, but most of them are just mid.

Instead, there are kids out there who are fighting against every disadvantage and have a passion and have a fire in them and want, you want a career in science despite all the disadvantages against them. And they will not look as good as that kid from Harvard who had all the setup to make them look amazing. But you know what? Rather place my money on that kid who had all the disadvantages and able to rise even a little bit above that because that kid has the fire and the passion and probably some really brilliant out-of-the-box ideas. Is.

0:28:38 Thomas: Yeah, mm -hmm.

0:29:50 Thomas: Been years since I've seen Moneyball. And was that part of the, what was the comparison there? I was like, sure.

0:29:55 Paul: Yeah. So the money ball had nothing to do with diversity, but it was about don't rely on traditional measures. You can't see my scare quotes here. Don't rely in traditional of judging who baseball player and a bad baseball player. Instead, when you strip away the advantages, that gives you a cleaner look at raw talent. And if you pick the right numbers, If you pick the right metrics, you can identify the raw talent, regardless of the advantages and the setup, the handicaps that people have. Then you pickthe ones with the best talent. And that's how you build a good team.

0:30:10 Thomas: Right. Right, right. Yeah. And, and, you know, it's not too far away from when the Supreme Court has gotten rid of, has banned affirmative action. And that's another big, you in the gut in, in any effort to try to put people on, on equal footing there.

0:30:47 Paul: It is. And honestly, I mean, the whole college undergraduate system, this is another angle I attack in the book, is we have way too many people entering STEM. Them. And I hate to say this because I do talks. I do public talks all the time. I have kids coming up to me and said, I want to be an astronomer. I had a meeting with an undergraduate student the other day and she was wonderful and smart. And she's like, I want To be an astronaut. And I said, okay, the first thing I have to tell you, and I don't like saying this is that there are essentially no jobs in astronomy.

0:31:00 Thomas: Really? Wow. Yeah.

0:31:19 Paul: We are, for every one open faculty position like research astronomer, you know, like, I want to do astronomy as a living. For every one open faculty position we create every year, we are creating roughly 10 to 20 PhDs that we are over producing students. We are over producing PhDs. Um, isn't have to be a bad thing, because you know what, having a PhD in astronomy or physics is kind of awesome.

0:31:35 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, I still want to someday have that, but yeah, so

0:31:49 Paul: And Yeah. I wave it in front of people's faces all the time. I'm just like, no, no. That's Dr. Sutter to you.

0:31:52 Thomas: Cool. Dr. Spaceman to you.

0:31:57 Paul: – I'm sorry, sir. Did you want fries with that or not? Not a bad thing. And in astronomy and physics and many, many STEM degrees have very successful careers outside of research. But graduate school and undergraduate education has not caught up with that fact. And they are simply training with

0:32:13 Thomas: Yeah. And it's too expensive. It's I mean, the main thing is the cost. If weren't so expensive to some of these degrees, then it wouldn't be such a tragedy when you can't do anything with it, you know?

0:32:28 Paul: It. And then you have this albatross. I paid back my student loans last month. I made my last payment. I deferred them through.

0:32:33 Thomas: Wow. Listeners don't know this. You are 73 years old.

0:32:37 Paul: Yes, I got it during the Truman administration.

0:32:42 Thomas: No, that joke doesn't doesn't work because it didn't cost fucking anything to get a degree. Whoops, I messed up. Yeah, no, you could only have gotten your degree within, I don't know, a couple of decades maybe for it to be that overpriced, but who knows?

0:32:48 Paul: True. It's truth. And so I'm okay with having a lot of astronomy undergrads and a lot of astronomy PhDs, but we have to recognize as a discipline and be up front with them that most of them will not land in research positions and most of them are signing up gunning for that one position and willing to knife each other in the back. And so we set up toxic competitive atmospheres, we set up this intense pressure, and then most of them filter out of the profession. And guess what? People who feel disillusioned with your profession are not going to say nice things about your profession. This is one component of the lack of trust where there are people who heard from the beginning of their childhood that they should have a degree in STEM because as the key to success, they get a degree INSTEM and then they

0:33:51 Thomas: What do you think, again, I know I keep asking to fix the world's problems, but like, where do you Think the solution is likely there? Like, because there's a lot of ways to attack that, I think. I mean, for one, like I just said, the cost is one component where it would be nice. I would love it if it was free to get whatever degree you wanted. That would be amazing because then it's like, who If I want to waste my time getting a degree in whatever, that's kind of on me. And I don't, you know, it's not really anyone's problem. If I want to do that and it's, like, you know, $200,000, then, yeah, it does kind of become a problem because I need a job and there's not enough, all that. So that's one component. What about just creating more jobs for this stuff? You know, what would that look like, do you think? Or is that a dumb thought? You know, he's

0:34:05 Paul: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the to create more jobs is to arm our science undergrads and our science graduate students with more tools to go outside of academia. Because right now we are training little professors. We are training them how to do scientific research. And we are not, as a professorial class, not training our students for a life outside of academia and showing them how, hey, you know, yes, you're doing like physics research and you're figuring out the Big Bang or whatever, which is cool. Cool.

Actually, what you're doing is developing really powerful problem solving skills, analytics skills, you're looking at the through a scientific lens. And these are very valuable, marketable skills that any company in the world would would love to have. Here, why don't we host like connections to industry event. And we're going to talk openly right now when people leave the field of science.

The joke I like to make is that we speak of the people who leave academia the same way we we speak of the recently deceased, like, oh, did you hear about Robert? Yeah, yeah, he, yeah, he works on Wall Street he won't he yeah, yeah, as he actually, like, makes quadruple

0:35:47 Thomas: Actually making money now, unlike us. Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:52 Paul: My salary and has a great work-life balance and actually has a home and a family, um,

0:35:57 Thomas: Already that makes me a little sad because already that answer is outside of academia. You know again, maybe this was naive of me, but as someone who doesn't, I'm not an insider on this, why aren't there just more jobs in academia? Or what would it take for that to be? More institutions, bigger institutions, you know, like,

0:36:17 Paul: Yeah, no, this is, uh, is one of the topics I, I tackle in the book. Because right now, for the past 30 years, federal support for fundamental research, I'm talking basic stuff, has been flat, relatively flat. There have been like little rises here or there, but relatively flat for 30 years. The meantime, the the academic university system in the United States has exploded. We have way more students. We do have more faculty. There are more professors in science running around in the United States than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago. These have not matched up, and it's not matched up with the funding. So we have more scientists in research roles fighting over fewer dollars.

0:37:09 Paul: And most of the jobs that we are offering new hires, like if you're fresh at a PhD or you get a postdoc and you're looking for a job, most available jobs are not research based, are not tenure track. They are either adjunct based, they are temporary, or they're just focused on teaching. Are in this system where funding has been flat or declining for decades. And in response to that, we are focusing more as a scientific discipline on short-term positions and short-term goals.

0:37:07 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:37:44 Paul: We are just trying to snag the next grant. We are not trying to grow long-term research positions, give people the stability they need to really dig into the fundamental workings of nature and discover something amazing. And so one of the harsh suggestions I make in the book is that if we still want the same student population, if we still want lots of grad students and lots of undergrads, we need to treat them differently. We need to give them more avenues into industry.

Need to drastically cut the number of research positions. We need to actually shrink as a community temporarily because we need to focus on being healthier. We need to focus in on that this is how science is done, that science is slow, science is careful, science is methodical, science has no guarantee of success whatsoever, and that we need to create this culture and then we need to go back to our funders, to the public, to Congress, to policymakers and say this is how science is done and we need funding not for one grant cycle or one administration. We need funding to be able to pay for a research scientist for decades, because that's what it takes.

0:39:09 Thomas: So, I'm realizing now that I while do have a pretty highly overrepresented academic audience, there's also me and people like me. So maybe if you can, can you sketch out kind of the architecture of the system you're talking about? When you say we need fewer research positions, I actually don't know what that means. Should have done this at first, probably. Sorry. I didn't realize.

0:39:30 Paul: Absolutely. No, it's fine. It's fine." Most research positions right now in the United States are short -term temporary appointments. They are called postdoctoral research positions, especially in the physical sciences, but also that this is very common across all of science. You get your PhD. If you want a career in research, typically you don't go right into a professor position at a big research university. There's this holding pattern called a postdoc where you do two or three years doing research somewhere interesting. I did a postdoc in Paris at a wonderful time. Some fields you do two or three of these in a row before you're considered good enough for a faculty position. Then once you're there, most of the faculty positions are not research positions. They are, again, temporary. They're just teaching -based, maybe on an annual contract. We need to restructure this system so that if I get a PhD, I need to know right away. I'm in my mid -20s. I'm trying to start a career. I need to know right away if I'm going to have a career in research or if I'm going to go off in industry.

0:40:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:42 Paul: Right now, what happens is generally everyone who wants a postdoc position has one because there's plenty of money for these very short -term positions. So you can go and you get a postdoc and you work for two or three years. Then you get another one, you work for two or three years. And then you find out that there are no long-term research positions in the sciences. By now, you're in like your mid -30s and you've moved four times around the country, possibly around the world, it's Weird.

It's weird, and I think there needs to be a shakeup here where if we're going to have science be done by long-term researchers, which I believe is ultimately for the best because that's when people can really dig into problems and take their time and not feel like they have to publish five articles a year. More of those. In order to get more of those, we need the money, and the money has to come from somewhere. And I think it should come from these short-term positions. So we should shrink the number of short-term decisions. We open up some more long-term lines. Yes, that means there are fewer people doing science, I get it. To me, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

0:41:08 Thomas: Jeez. It's like you're in the military or something.

0:41:55 Thomas: Well, especially because from, from how it sounds, again, this is just coming from the outside based on your description, but it almost sounds like it's, it's kind of a trick. It makes it look like there's all these positions, or it makes it look like, oh yeah, okay, I can do this for a living, but then there's this like hidden limitation on it that, really, no, you can't, you can have some part-time stuff for a few years, but if you, there's, want to do any more than that, you're just kind of screwed, is that how it is? Yeah.

0:42:20 Paul: That's basically it. And that is basically how it is constructed. Some departments, I don't want to speak like this is some universal truth. Some departments are shifting away from this. Some departments are being more transparent. Some disciplines in science are more open about this than others. So part of this is colored from my own experience in astronomy and physics, where it's like, oh, yeah, you want to do research? Okay, apply for a postdoc. Oh, you get a postdoctor. All right, I'm on the track. I'm doing this. Oh, I need a second postdoc before I'm considered, know, worthy of a consideration for professors. Okay, okay, do a postdoc. Oh, by the way, there are no jobs.

0:42:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:42:58 Paul: Good luck. Some institutions have this horrible, you think you like, you, you get a professorship, this is it. Some institutions, you don't get tenure right away. In some institutions, you're put on what's called the tenure track, which is you get three to five years to prove yourself. And by prove yourself, I mean bring in the big bucks grant money.

0:43:21 Paul: You don't do that, you're just out. You're done. If you are able to, then great. You get tenure, and the expectation is that you keep bringing in the big bucks grant money, some institutions, especially top tier ones, will intentionally overhire. They will hire two or three people knowing that only one of them is going to actually have a career there for the rest of their lives.

0:43:20 Thomas: I'm Sure, that makes a fun, nice work environment where everyone is happy. It's

0:43:47 Paul: Is super great. And yes, super healthy, super collegial.

0:43:52 Thomas: Like a reality show, more, you Know.

0:43:53 Paul: It's vicious. Like it's real Real housewives of academia.

0:43:59 Thomas: Know?

0:44:00 Paul: This toxic atmosphere contributes to the over-publication, contributes to scientists trying to hype themselves up and make a name for themselves beyond what the evidence can sustain, creates disillusionment because you get starry-eyed kids who come into the pipeline wanting a career in science and then, oh, sorry to crush your dreams, go do something else. But we're not going to help you figure out what that something else is. We're not gonna give you any kind of support or In fact, we'll pretend you never existed. And in that kind of negative attitude just festers. And it creates the culture where science is seen as closed off, sitting in the ivory towers, inaccessible to the common person. And then we get surprised when people don't trust scientists.

0:44:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:50 Thomas: I don't, that's interesting. The last step there, I don't, I I don't know. That's a, do you have any, um, speaking, I guess, as a scientist, do you have any empirical support for that last step? These are definitely issues, and I don't, you're right on, uh... Or, sorry, I shouldn't say that. I don't have the authority to say that in any way. Um, I see, I... Those seem very plausible and well -reasoned to me. And I've definitely like spoken to enough academics and have been around this enough to everything you're saying resonates. But that last part, I don't know. The part where that's a like contributor to mistrust of science. What do you think about that? I mean, what are you kind of basing it?

0:45:28 Paul: No, that's fair. What you're saying is fair. I don't expect anyone to believe anything I'm saying, and that's fine. That's my default position. But that's

0:45:33 Thomas: No, I wonder if there's anything, any data you've looked at or anywhere, or if it's more just and like it's a problem anyway, so why not fix it?

0:45:37 Paul: Exactly my approach. This seems kind of gross and kind of bad. We should probably fix it. I in my gut that it's leading to other bad consequences, Other feedback, because we have this insanely competitive system within science. So we are constantly competing with each other. One of the ways we compete against each other is by trying to outpublish each other, and then that is how you get the fraud and the laziness and the sloppiness and in the plagiarism, which contributes to this flood of scientific output, most of which is either useless or wrong. Then it's hard for someone outside of science to know what the heck is going on. And so I believe it is one thread, one cause in that general pressure of scientific, scientific, uh, yep.

0:45:50 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

0:46:41 Thomas: Taken. And that's, didn't mean that to take away at all from the argument. I just, that last step, I was curious if you had looked into any, I don't know, polling or anything about that, but that's okay. Regardless, it's definitely a problem. And I know, you know I have more than a few like friends who have been kicked out by this shitty system, you know, where it's like, you just, you start with one dream of what you want to do.

0:46:46 Paul: Yep. You're Just Chewed Up And Yeah.

0:47:00 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. And, and thing, and I, again, linking it back to more of what, what tend to look at, I think it's actually a major contributor to this cottage industry of sort of anti-woke intellectual dark web bullshit professors who like make, they can make way more money by feeding into the right-wing attack on academia and science and by taking that kind of like, "Oh, I was an insider, but now I'm not. Here's my podcast or whatever about it." Like Brett Weinstein and like there's people who make massive names for themselves. And by the way, they usually end up with like Coke money, or not as in cocaine, but probably that, too. But like, you know, Coke, and also, you Peter Thiel money and like there's, I just, we're going to cover this somewhere, but I just was reading. Do you know about, again, sorry, linking back to my stuff that I cover, but do you know about this, you bullshit University, University of Austin that people are trying to do.

0:47:55 Paul: Don't Know.

0:47:56 Thomas: Okay. So it's like an anti-woke kind are doing a school, but not with all the free speech police and whatever. It's like, they think, yeah, they They think like, essentially, I, you know, I've kept track of it over the years. It's been, gone. You know, Bari Weiss was a major, you know, part of that. And it's been a few years and I followed it as kind of a funny, like, oh, look, it's dumb because when you actually try to make a real university, you end up just reproducing the things that are the reason that, the way, their, critiques their are not as legitimate. So they're recreating things that are just how the system works and thinking they were going to change it, setting aside like you're very obviously legitimate critiques of the system. But what I just read, the reason I bring it up is I just read that just trying to get accreditation and they are actually making it happen. And they have raised $200 million.

0:47:56 Paul: Oh, I See, okay, it's Like the, like Twitter, you Or X, You, sorry, I forgot, oh, I'd like to get, can, can I become one Of these like Can I Sell, can I sell out? Oh, I Would Like Because my last grant, I just got a bunch, I was awarded, I just got a bunch of expired Arby's coupons, that was no

0:48:48 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, it's it's is a problem because not even good Arby's coupons. Man, that's disappointing.

0:49:03 Paul: But if you know the manager, you know, they, they Let you, they let us Slide. Yeah, It's cool.

0:49:05 Thomas: Okay, they might, they might. That's good. I know. And it genuinely is a major issue. Actually I think that's a very large contributor to this problem of science and universities being undermined, which is the incentives to just be the mouthpiece of the kind of conservative backlash against it. It's so much more lucrative. It just is $200 million. I read that and I thought it was a mistake. I had to check it. And then I went and it's like, I mean, it is, they're bragging about their own funding. I guess they could be lying, but like it was from them.

0:49:09 Paul: Yeah, There's If like you use this phrase of science, science being undermined, if science and academia are being undermined, then we need to look at our foundations, that's A metaphor, that's Good one.

0:49:51 Thomas: Yeah. Or we just just need more billionaires, I guess. Enough of the, yeah, I'm not crossing my fingers on that one.

0:49:53 Paul: Yeah, Wherever They Are There There are, like, I was supported for several years by the Simons Foundation, which is founded by Jim Simons, a billionaire who created a center for computational astrophysics in New York City.

0:50:16 Thomas: You don't hear about those ones, you know? That's nice. I'm glad they did that.

0:50:21 Paul: Oh, no. And you don't hear about it because it's super rare.

0:50:23 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Or it's like George Soros and then you get all those conspiracies or whatever. But no, $200 million, that is just insane. It You was funny because they're like, yeah, it's over 50 donors. It was like an absurdly small number of donors where it's like, okay, so you have some very wealthy people. I think the average contribution was like $500,000. And you're like okay, yeah.

0:50:35 Paul: Well, yes. Dang.

0:50:45 Thomas: That'll get you.

0:50:46 Paul: Yep. I'll do it. I'll do it. No, I don't know what to do about that. But what I can I think I can do is make science and academic research more unassailable. It have more integrity and have it be more honest and transparent so that when the attacks come, like, of course, the attacks are going to come and they're going to come from all directions. You know, sciences have faced this for hundreds of years. This is nothing new. But if we can at least say like, hey, we're doing everything. Honestly, we're treating our own young scientists right. We're being transparent and open about science communication. We're sharing our results.

We're not trying to blow things up or send a message. We are a voice in the political decision-making process, but not trying to guide policy. If we stick to our guns and if we are honest with ourselves, with our students, and with the public, then I think we can come through to the other side and we can make science even more. I would love a reality where, like I said earlier, whoever gets on the ballot box, science is going to be robustly funded because everyone is

0:50:47 Thomas: Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah... Yeah.

0:51:53 Paul: Like, yay science.

0:51:53 Thomas: Well, we all want that world for sure.

0:51:56 Paul: That's the world I want, yeah.

0:51:58 Thomas: Don't mistake me. I didn't mean that as an argument against what you're saying. I actually think the problems you're identifying, it's possible maybe they will alleviate some of my concern as well, which is if you fix a lot of what, very plausibly to me sounds like what you've identified as a reason why this is this cutthroat, shitty, miserable work environment, you know, right? Right. Like if you improve that, there's going to be way less of a like that desire to leave in the first place, you know, or there'll be more positions or there will be just more general.

0:52:24 Paul: Exactly. Yeah. This, uh, this disillusionment. Uh, with, uh, because we are ejecting a lot of proto-scientists out of the academic system, and and some of them leave and have fond memories of their time in grad school and are making a million bucks and, like, having a great time, and and have very kind words to say, but then some of whom don't. And, I'd like to minimize the latter.

0:52:28 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I realized I've already taken your allotted time that I could go on forever. I want to make sure. Is there perhaps something to leave the listeners with? Because, you know, there are seven areas you said you identified. I think we went through. Gosh, did we get to two of them or was it just one?

0:53:05 Paul: Like one and a half, maybe?

0:53:06 Thomas: Yeah. Do you want to tease listeners with maybe another one just so that they can go out and buy the book Rescuing Science, pre -order that?

0:53:06 Paul: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do talk about the politicization of science, the role that I believe science should have in public policy and public debate. I feel like we are doing it wrong and we are being used. I believe the scientific voice is being taken from scientists and being distorted. And so it's not representing the science anymore. I do talk about diversity and hiring and how we are really letting down significant fractions of the American population. Population, and I talk about the grant funding machine and how science is slowing down and becoming risk averse.

And I talk a lot about science communication and about honest science communication and about how scientists need to be able to say and be brave enough to say, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. This is what science is. It is discovery. And it's about bringing people on board with, on that journey of joyful curiosity into our universe. That is the core of science. That is The Soul of Science. And that's what I want to get people to resonate with. Rest to me is just details. I want people to be fans of science as a discipline, as a way of looking at the universe, not fans of science because of the results.

0:53:18 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Oh, yeah.

0:54:02 Thomas: Well, It's a compatible message with this show. Dr. Paul Sutter. The book is Rescuing Science. Make sure you check that out. Hey, do you want to throw anything else out while we're here as a plug to send listeners to?

0:54:47 Paul: Sure, why not? So I have a long-running podcast, Ask a Spaceman, it's so much fun. People ask me questions, just email me questions. I put them in a giant spreadsheet, and then I pull from the spreadsheet twice a month, and I do an episode about it. So it's this wonderful random walk through physics and astronomy. Give that a listen. I love it. I do have two other books out, Your Place in the Universe and How to Die in Space. They are all out on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and my website, pmsutter.com. Hey, if you want to see a science and art performance, go to syrendance.org, S-Y-R-E-N dance.org.

0:54:52 Thomas: A good name.

0:55:24 Thomas: Fantastic. Thank you so much for giving us your time. All

0:55:27 Paul: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.