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Archived Comments for: The guards themselves

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  1. Autonomy is the Thing

    Eric Grosch, Real American Institute for Leadership in Restoration Of Appropriate Due-process (R.A.I.L.R.O.A.D.)

    22 July 2004

    Petsko seems to have suggested that some form of external control of the conduct of scientists and professional persons be necessary, because government-agents believe it to be. Juvenal asked the rhetorical question to which Petsko referred, “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies,” in the context of guards who guarded the wives of absent husbands. His most general point seems to have been that humans, like all organisms, are autonomous, so no life-form can control any other life-form. In particular, in the context to which he referred, the guards are subject to romantic urges similar to those that any man experiences in close proximity to women. The absent husbands could obviously not control the guards to prevent them from engaging in the very activity, against which they had hired them to guard their wives.

    Then, as now, each human organism had his own mind, brain, central nervous system, cardiovascular system, digestive system, immune system, etc., all self-contained within a cutaneous envelope, that separates each organism from his fellows. One result of that arrangement is that each organism receives its own environmental signals and forms its own action-plan for survival, growth, reproduction, posterity, prosperity and pursuit of happiness, i.e., autonomy, perhaps the most obvious characteristic of all living organisms, yet standard textbooks of biology omit autonomy from the standard list of six characteristics of life:

    1 - Cells

    2 - Organization

    3 - Energy Use

    4 - Homeostasis

    5 - Growth

    6 - Reproduction

    The reason for that omission seems obscure, but my personal chief suspects are governmental agents, who control textbook-content, hence indoctrination of young minds and finally attempt to control the citizenry at large through regulation. They seem to feel compelled to suppress any notion that any citizen-organism might be able to exert autonomous control of his own actions. On that basis, they promote external control through dysfunctional and coercive motivators: the penal paradigm, the stock-in-trade of government, at all levels.

    Yet, scientific research is largely a solitary matter, inaccessible to control by external agents. Unless the guard replicates every move of the researcher while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him, he can never even know much about a researcher's activities, far less regulate them.

    The autonomy of the well bred and well educated scientist seems likely to generate the internal drives one readily observes toward socially approved self-actualization and pride of workmanship -- the joy of the job well done. Such powerful internal incentives are nearly universal and form the most effective bulwarks against misconduct.

    Thus, scientists, educated and trained in similar ways, over many years and indoctrinated to high ethical standards, seem likely to be autonomously reliable in carrying out their scientific work, unless untoward external pressures produce dysfunctional incentives.

    The most obvious example is appointing scientists to guard other scientists as external controllers, most often in the guise of what we laughingly call “peer-review.” If the scheme were really among peers, i.e., equals, they would come to agreements based on rational dialogue. As it is, one group of co-called “peers,” who act as the guards, in the superior positions of arbitrary administrative authority, determine unilaterally whether the “peers” under guard shall receive funding for their projects and another group determines whether the findings of the “peers” under guard shall see publication. That arrangement is repugnant to the fundamental egalitarian nature of science and may prompt the oppressed “peers” under guard to pursue dysfunctional countermeasures against the tyranny that offends them, such as stepping up the rate of production of results through fakery or other misconduct.

    Competing interests

    I am an autonomous living organism and perennial victim of dysfunctional peer-review yet I have maintained my ethical integrity

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