When prestigious academics evaluate the vita (i.e., publication list) of another academic, they want to see only top journals listed there. A vita with five top journal articles and ten medium journal articles looks worse to them than a vita with just five top articles; if you can’t publish in the very top journals, they’d rather you didn’t publish at all.
Paul Davies, chair of the group that decides what SETI scientists will do if evidence of aliens is ever found, thinks similarly about science news: until scientists can say something to the public with great (~99%) confidence, they should say nothing. (Quotes below.) You see, frequent public updates on science issues of great popular interest, like evidence of aliens or asteroids headed toward Earth, would result in reporters bothering scientists at work with “mayhem”, disrupting their “lines of communication,” and disturbing their “dispassionate analysis.” The fact that most early low-probability signs would end up being false alarms is “damaging to the credibility of science.” So until scientists can confidently say that an asteroid will hit us or that we see aliens, they should just whisper to each other.
In the extreme case of receiving an actual alien message directed at us, Davies prefers scientists to kept quiet for the many years it would likely take to decode it fully. And he prefers aliens to not send us any useful tech info, as then we would fight over who could decode it first. How disruptive!
One might justify this confidence-or-silence policy by arguing either that non-scientists are biased to overreact to low confidence news, or that reporters are biased to present low probability news as if it were high probability, and non-scientists gullibly believe them. I have not seen any systematic evidence presented in support of these claims, however.
Within academia, the bias against non-top articles seems like signaling. Since folks confident they are great would not admit they’d ever done work that could not meet the highest standards, medium journal publications reveal a lack of confidence. Similarly, I suspect signaling is behind the confidence-or-silence policy. Since it is harder to credibly say something with great confidence than with low confidence, saying something with low confidence sends a bad signal about your abilities. Keeping info secret is also a status move; info gives control and control marks status.
Quotes from Eerie Silence: Continue reading "Confidence or Silence" »
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