Scientific American — Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto: The Threatened Enlightenment

Relevant to the recent study showing that the majority of peer reviewed economics papers in prestige journals cannot be replicated.

Harry Kroto (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1996): I'm gonna talk about what science is because it's a totally misunderstood sort of subject. There are aspects of science which are important and of course we know, the body of knowledge that you learn at school, all right?

The applications of those knowledge - technology, the only thing that journalists ever ask a general 99 percent of the time. Perhaps most important is the way that we discover new knowledge. But for me, the most important, by far, is that it's the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.

Everyone should think about that. Because then it becomes a much bigger subject. In fact, for me, perhaps the most important subject there is. And the ethical purpose of education must involve teaching children how they can decide what they're being told is actually true. And that's not the case in general.

The teaching of a skeptical, evidence-based assessment of all claims - all claims - without exception is fundamentally an intellectual integrity issue. Without evidence, anything goes. Think about it. Common sense says the sun goes round the Earth. Who agrees with me?

Look at it. Starts over here, ends over there. It's uncommon sense that was needed to recognize that the Earth was turning on its axis. The uncommon sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Gendona, Bruna was burnt to death. We had to learn to be very careful and question everything.

Let me just check - how many of you know the evidence for Galileo to say that the Earth was going around the sun? Put your hand up. You've accepted it. Almost nobody's put their hand up. It's incredible.

Look at yourself. You've accepted this. You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that. Find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept. 

And the pragmatic criterion clearly doesn't apply in the case of economics and policy.

Scientific American (July 25, 2013)
Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto: The Threatened Enlightenment
Steve Mirsky