The Wall Street Journal recently published a poorly-written article by Dan Kagan-Kans entitled "The Rise of 'Conspiracy Physics.'" Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit describes the article like this:
"The article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.
I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle."
Woit does not seem to have the time, inclination or energy to point out what the main fallacy in the article is. But I can do that. The main fallacy is its completely illegitimate use of the word "conspiracy."
The article discusses some critics of scientific academia, and inappropriately labels such critics as conspiracy theorists. But the type of criticism discussed is not conspiracy thinking at all. It is simply criticism of overconfidence, elitism, dubious theorizing and poor performance.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines "conspiracy" like this: "the activity of secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal." What is a conspiracy theorist? A conspiracy theorist is someone who believes that some group has hatched one or more secret plots to do harm or do something illegal.
The typical critic of scientific academia is not a conspiracy theorist. Such a critic does not believe that scientists met in secret to create some plan to do harm. Instead, such a critic typically believes that some scientists were guilty of overconfidence, dogmatism, dubious theorizing or poor performance. If you suspect or believe that some group is misspeaking or bungling, that does not make you a conspiracy theorist.
The article mentions criticism of string theory. Critics of string theory are not conspiracy theorists. String theory is a widely-touted theory in physics, one that has no evidence in its favor. String theorists made grand promises around 1990 that they were going to deliver a "theory of everything." But so far string theory has been a failure as a scientific theory. No observational results have supported it. String theorists were hoping very strongly that experimental results from a major scientific project (the Large Hadron Collider) would provide evidence in support of a theory called supersymmetry, a theory that string theory is built upon. No such evidence ever appeared. The supersymmetry theory on which string theory is built flunked its observational test, and the "superpartner" particles it predicted were never found.
It is not any type of conspiracy thinking to be critical of the poor performance and overconfidence of string theorists in academia. Such criticism does not involve any belief or suspicion about people formulating a secret plan to do harm. Similarly, it is not any type of conspiracy thinking to be critical of the poor performance and overconfidence of neuroscientists in academia, nor is it any type of conspiracy thinking to gather reasons for disbelieving in the dogmas taught by such neuroscientists. Such criticism does not involve any belief or suspicion about people formulating a secret plan to do harm or do something illegal.
What has happened is that Dan Kagan-Kan has engaged in a very lazy defamation of science academia critics. Without providing any evidence at all that any of them believe in any conspiracy theory, he has engaged in mudslinging by attempting to label such people as conspiracy theorists. This kind of lazy defamation is common these days. In the 1950's whenever you wanted to use the laziest and easiest way to defame some person calling for social progress, you might call such a person a communist, even when there was no evidence the person supported communism. Nowadays the laziest and easiest way to defame some person criticizing the overconfidence, unjustified dogmatism and poor performance of some scientists is to call such a person a conspiracy theorist, even when there is no evidence that the person believes in a conspiracy.
I myself am a critic of overconfidence, unjustified claims and poor performance of neuroscientists; but I am not any conspiracy theorist. I do not believe or suspect that neuroscientists ever formulated some secret plan to do anyone harm, or any type of secret plan.
Another type of lazy libel people can make against critics of erring scientists is to call such critics "anti-science." 99% of the people called "anti-science" are actually pro-science, in that they are people who appreciate and applaud well-done science and good performance by scientists. It is not "anti-science" to draw attention to misstatements and poor performance by some scientists, just as it is not "anti-baseball" to criticize some baseball players or baseball team for performing poorly. I consider myself very strongly pro-science, defining science as "facts established by observations" and "systematic efforts to establish facts by observations, experiments and analysis." I appreciate and applaud the work of scientists who do their jobs well, and avoid claiming to know things they do not know. People who criticize misspeaking scientists and poorly performing scientists who use bad methods tend to actually be friends of science, just as testers who find bugs in software programs are friends of the software development process.
A sleazy tactic
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