Controlled Experiments
by Misha Angrist
When the opportunity arose for me to speak at a local Stand Up For Science event in March, I hesitated. Despite everything I’ve written, I found myself wrestling with the idea of becoming a participant—an activist—rather than a chronicler. I’ve not worn a white coat or wielded a pipet for many years; I have not a single grant dollar at stake. But I still teach at an elite private university and I’m fully vaccinated. So, you know—J’Accuse!
I wanted to be part of it, insofar as an old white dude who doesn’t do real science can be. But if I were going to speak, then I thought it was important to try to do more than just serve up a cocktail of rage. Here’s what I said, lightly edited.
In the 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, our hero, Daniel Miller, dies in a car accident and finds himself not in heaven or hell, but in a place called Judgment City. There, if he is to move on to a better existence, he must prove to a panel of judges that, over the course of his life, he was able to conquer his fears. The problem, Daniel learns from his lawyer (an incandescent Rip Torn), is that humans only use three percent of their brains—we know so little, and thus we are afraid of so much.
At the risk of being melodramatic, I would say that “we”—and by “we,” I mean those of us who have been referred to derisively over the last 20-plus years as the “reality-based community”—are all residents of Judgment City now. (Though unlike in the movie, the weather here is not always perfect, the food is not always delicious, and Meryl Streep is not smitten with us.) We have landed in this surreal moment that, not so long ago, would have been unthinkable. We find ourselves at risk of contracting diseases that had been consigned to the past, so much so that our physicians have never seen them; our institutions are routinely evaluated based not on the quality of our work but on their subservience to power, and misinformation/disinformation is becoming the coin of our increasingly messed-up realm. Fear is a perfectly rational response to all of this. Many are afraid now, simply as a consequence of having borne witness to so many devastating events, and so many unforced errors.
And yet. I refuse to waste my day in court. I want to defend not just science, but curiosity, knowledge, and the very act of thinking.
Keep us breathing fire!
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