As the person who became the subject of the 15-minute Twitter Hate Of The Week for making the first comment on the "Hot Women Don't Feel Cold" paper, a week or so before the podcast appeared, I'm pleased to read this post. Apparently the times are now finally propitious for putting one's head above the parapet on this sort of thing. Perhaps it took the arrival of actual misogynistic fascism to make this discussion possible, which is a bit depressing.
The storm cost me a (very middle-of-the-list) authorship berth on a multi-author paper that was in draft at the time, because three other authors -- one of them of critical importance to that paper -- demanded of the lead author that my name be removed, as I was now The Worst Sexist And Probably Racist Bully In Academia I Mean Just Look At The Guy's Photo. (The lead author was very apologetic about it, and I was allowed to portray my withdrawal as being due to not meeting authorship criteria.)
I did, however, get several supportive DMs from various people, about half of them women. The phrase "WTF?" featured prominently in these messages of support.
Wow! Thanks for sharing this story. I was not aware of this at all, and I'm sorry this happened to you, Nick. Boo. And who, pray tell, are the three offended authors? As they say, my DMs are open! LOL
I didn't find out who the authors were; the lead author was very apologetic and explained as much as they felt able to when asking me nicely if I would help him out by withdrawing. There were probably 20 people on the paper. I suppose could have invited him to choose a hill to die on, but I try to be pragmatic about these things.
That’s disgusting and the lead author should be ashamed. Even if the cause is good, you cannot allow authorship to be decided by blackmail. It’s not only unethical, it is the opposite of scholarship.
Quite possibly, but I guess the reply would be that "that's what a privileged white guy would say". What might appear to one person as blackmail might merely be "holding to account" to another. As I often like to say, our problem is that science ought to be done by a bunch of Spocks, but we are all Kirks.
If they didn't like being an author with you, they could've resolved the problem by leaving the paper. Shoehorning someone off like that is unethical and unscientific.
That might be a reply, but any such reply is confused about what authorship is. Authorship is not a prize handed out to the worthy, it is a statement about who made substantial contributions to the paper. I think it’s unserious and unethical to conflate the two.
To make myself clear: while I wouldn’t start a collaboration with a known mass murderer, if I had already completed a collaboration with them and only then learned of their crimes, I would certainly not demand their removal. Any such demand would be unethical. Ditto for any other evil.
The eternally offended hold the power and they enjoy a good grievance - whether they truly believe what they are defending, we will never know but they enjoy flexing their power. You just happened to be on the receiving end this time.
Perhaps we have to move to a methodology where research is presented anonymously, much like how musicians try out for orchestras! The trend of applying different standards and gauging reactions based on perceived levels of marginalization in society is not unique to higher academia. One would hope that evaluations are based on merit and scientific rigour, but that is not the case. Gosh, I'm old.
Merit? Scientific rigour?! Spoken like a true senior scholar punching down 🙄Arguing from identity and representation still reigns supreme in higher ed humanities. What’s more, journals and conferences in my discipline advocate citation justice: citing only scholars who possess oppressed identities.
Well since you've mentioned the Talmud, they indeed had many things to say on criticism and who should you learn from (translations are all crudely mine, sorry in advance):
"A blade can't be sharpened except by the edge of another"
Regarding the disagreements between Hillel and Shamai the Talmud says "both are the living words of God".
Another saying is ""I have learned from all my teachers, but from my peers more than my teachers, and from my students more than anyone".
Finally there is a story about one of the wise man whose friend had died and he is upset with every one he studies with after, since they all admire his wisdom instead of criticizing him like his friend used to.
Hey, Michael. This is an important post. Appreciate your argument and am very familiar with the many shut-down-conversation strategies due to power dynamics. In response to systemic forms of discrimination like racism and sexism, it’s part of a suite of polarized and under-developed strategies to “level the playing field”. At the same time, there is considerable evidence from implicit bias and workplace research that minoritized groups DO tend to face harsher criticism, greater scrutiny, less advancement than their normative peers. As a practitioner and researcher in workplaces, I can verify these as very common patterns across sectors. Your early research informed my thinking on matters of bias yet it seems to be under-acknowledged in your essay. I’m curious how you account for this not just in your analysis but actual practice?
This is a fair pushback. But I think there are two issues: Should everyone's work face scrutiny? Yes, that's universalism. Are evaluators currently applying that scrutiny evenly across race, gender, and status? No. The "don't punch down" rule tries to fix the second problem by corrupting the first problem. Better to attack the bias directly: blinded review where feasible, structured rubrics instead of holistic judgments, and pushing evaluators to apply the same standards visibly across the board. That treats the cause rather than wrapping certain scholars in protective gauze, which hurts not just them but the pursuit of knowledge more generally.
I agree with those strategies. I’m adding this view as many essays that attempt to criticize the power-dynamic-leveling strategies—which I have done for some time—often fail to acknowledge the actual role of identity in decision-making. In doing so they alienate many progressives, many minority group members, falling into the “anti-DEI” bin. I encourage you to include identity in your analysis in order to reach a wider audience who need your work but may dismiss it as another smart, white guy promoting “diversity viewpoint” (another under-developed strategy that mirrors what it critiques).
Who are you calling white?! And let me get this right--in a post about universalism you think it's appropriate to critique me based on my (incorrect) identity? Oy. Your comment actually reinforces my point: My argument either stands on its merits or it doesn't, no need to bring up my identity
Very interesting to me, since the standard in philosophy is pretty pointed and aggressive questioning at talk Q&As. An endowed chair at Cambridge once handed me my ass after a talk I gave. After another, an especially ornery questioner actually apologized to me afterwards. I didn’t boo-hoo about these criticisms. Just went to the bar like an adult :-)
I agree a lot with this and while I'm relatively "junior" (have had two postdocs and no permanent job) I've still seen the gamut of this (i.e. what levels of criticism are accepted in seminars, peer review, and such) across three countries (southeast U.S., east Scotland, and southeast France). It's hard for me to imagine a systemic solution since social norms vary so much by geography and field. I suppose increased anonymity helps, as you and others suggest, but isn't feasible for everything (e.g. talks). All the examples you give strike me as very North American (i.e. great concern over race, use of social media, the term "punching down"), not sure if that's relevant or not. Then I suppose it is really difficult for most of us to separate our opinions of people and our opinions of their ideas so in practice criticizing people's ideas may almost always amount to criticizing them at some level. Not sure about that last bit, throwing out a loose idea.
Thanks for engaging, Nick. I agree with you that when our ideas are criticized, it feels like we personally are being criticized. This is why science (if not scholarship more generally) is so damn hard--it demands that we have a thick skin. Otherwise, the larger entereprise of knowledge generation cannot benefit from productive disagreement. Cheers!
I have observed the same deterioration of academic culture in STEM. Nearly every question following a talk starts with "Thank you for a great talk" -- even when talk is not great. Practically no one asks tough questions. When tough questions are asked, the discussion is curtailed. And yes, I noticed a tendency to treat junior researchers with kid gloves and to shower disproportionate praise on female and minority speakers. And those who stick to old-fashion style of academic discussion may find themselves in trouble. At one of my seminar visits, I met a physics professor who told me that he was called to the chair office and berated for ..... asking a female speaker too many questions. The chair--a DEI zealot--saw it as creating a hostile environment. Thank you for the great post -- ;).
What exactly is the definition of punching down you have in mind here? I ask this because there is a tension. One the one hand, you say that punching down is not immoral and you want to defend it but in the end you seem to suggest otherwise. If by punching down you mean refraining from raising criticisms in academic settings, that’s not punching down, that’s a misunderstanding of it. Punching down (the way I see it at least), is, for example, going on Twitter criticizing talks/work/research (sometimes neutrally, sometimes in a jerkish way) under the guise of philosophical criticism, particularly against someone who is junior, say, whose consequences for possible 'piling on' might be something that hurts them significantly. Twitter is not academia, one can raise criticisms in a personal email, or during the talk, or by publishing an article on a journal. Of course people talk outside of academia – but post-internet I think we got the sense that the boundaries of academic circles have expanded so it is appropriate to bring your criticisms to Twitter. That is what I have reservations about. I also have reservations about how this post starts, by the way. If I was that PhD student and I read this piece I would not feel good. Was it necessary to start this post in that way? I agree that we should be able to raise criticisms (in appropriate settings in the appropriate way) but when we post something on the internet (“the internet”, I sound like Steven Harper now) its ramifications can have unpredictable and magnified consequences so it’s a good idea to be very careful. Sometimes it may be too late to regret later.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Martina. Where I'd push back is on your venue point. If work is published or made public, the critique should be public too. That's how the record gets corrected. One of the lessons of the replication crisis was that quiet hallway concerns didn't do the work public scrutiny does. Bad findings stayed in the literature for decades because only a few people wanted to criticize publilcly. So I don't think social media sits outside the academic circle, for better and worse. Fair point on the opening though. I tried to keep the PhD example anonymous and brief because I didn't want to make it about any one person. Whether I succeeded is a different matter.
I got into a discussion the other day with another cartoonist about why there are almost no cartoons skewering the left. The problem, we concluded, is that punching down is cringey. I had crested a few possible examples: medieval-style stocks in a college quad, a haloed Jesus handing out fentanyl in an alley, and my favourite, people lined up at a food bank, all with cell phones, one talking to a friend on her phone, captioned "It's true Janet, just giving it away!"
I hope you are right and universities and research science generally is sobering up.
Your conclusion is the same as the one reached by George Carlin many moons ago. In comedy and perhaps satire, that sort of humor doesn't land (at least according to him; Dave Chapelle and Andrew Dice Clay when he was a thing would disagree of course). I consider science--if not scholarship more generally--to be different. Our job is to generate knowledge, and we can't do that if we need to hold back on telling folks what we really think about their ideas because of some identity characteristic.
I think some of this is something that is pretty unique to online spaces, where people can engage in pile-ons very quickly. Imagine if the senior scholar had made a comment in person to the postdoc about selection bias in his sample. They could have had a conversation about it and it would have just ended without all the drama that occurred. Online conversation is just always heightened and can quickly spiral.
I take the points that you have raised here, and I am rather amused, and intrigued. You see, I agree, for the most part, with the main objection. However, I don't believe that it is the objection that takes centre stage here. I believe that your point misses something grand that has been one of the main criticisms from the marginalized communities i.e., science is not value-free and thus talks of universalism about it are equally oppressive, to put it briefly.
To be charitable, yes, this talk of punching whichever direction is misconstrued far too often to defend notions that would be otherwise indefensible and is contributing to exactly an infantilization of scholarship from the global south and other marginalized communities.
Frankly, I don't believe we need this kind of protection, our ideas stand on their own because we're just as capable of intellectual rigor as the next person, and the systems of knowing we're working from are equally foundational to the human condition. This is nothing new.
I believe you have made the error of centralizing universalism and science as though these are intellectual yardsticks, without at the same time allowing yourself to acknowledge that it is these concepts, before the keyboard activists (😅), that have been weaponized against marginalized communities. When people are talking about power, it is against exactly these concepts that have been treated as immutable that people are trying to punch (😅)
Great article. We have been living in the ‘unenlightened’ era for a while now. I’m heartened that you think some of it might be weaning. I will remain optimistic.
I regularly pick some papers to teach my audience what goes into research and how a paper could be improved. My experience has been quite the opposite. Given that I am still young and in grad school, I get told off by my seniors and teachers to NOT question papers of people more experienced than me because it could be seen as disrespectful.
For example, I read this paper from a senior department head where the numbers didn't make much sense. I made a post about it, and the next thing I know, I am getting a call from my former teachers to not question seniors.
I could have been wrong. Maybe I didn't understand the technique they were using correctly, but I never got any clarifications. Maybe honor-based cultures place honor above the scientific endeavour?
That said, I am grateful to the teachers who have criticized my work. It's helped me think better and produce better work. It has been harsh at times, but I would pick harsh criticism over mindless fawning.
Great article! Although it seems blindingly obvious to evaluate and engage with science this way, reminders are necessary.
I think this approach of cushioning criticism is an overcorrection for how academia has been excessively hierarchical and credentialist in the past: as you say, a noble aim. But no science is immune from fair criticism. If it is, it is no longer science. David Deutsch's thesis on how truth-seeking science must be a 'good explanation' and falsifiable to drive human progress, then utterly breaks down.
As the person who became the subject of the 15-minute Twitter Hate Of The Week for making the first comment on the "Hot Women Don't Feel Cold" paper, a week or so before the podcast appeared, I'm pleased to read this post. Apparently the times are now finally propitious for putting one's head above the parapet on this sort of thing. Perhaps it took the arrival of actual misogynistic fascism to make this discussion possible, which is a bit depressing.
The storm cost me a (very middle-of-the-list) authorship berth on a multi-author paper that was in draft at the time, because three other authors -- one of them of critical importance to that paper -- demanded of the lead author that my name be removed, as I was now The Worst Sexist And Probably Racist Bully In Academia I Mean Just Look At The Guy's Photo. (The lead author was very apologetic about it, and I was allowed to portray my withdrawal as being due to not meeting authorship criteria.)
I did, however, get several supportive DMs from various people, about half of them women. The phrase "WTF?" featured prominently in these messages of support.
Wow! Thanks for sharing this story. I was not aware of this at all, and I'm sorry this happened to you, Nick. Boo. And who, pray tell, are the three offended authors? As they say, my DMs are open! LOL
I didn't find out who the authors were; the lead author was very apologetic and explained as much as they felt able to when asking me nicely if I would help him out by withdrawing. There were probably 20 people on the paper. I suppose could have invited him to choose a hill to die on, but I try to be pragmatic about these things.
That’s disgusting and the lead author should be ashamed. Even if the cause is good, you cannot allow authorship to be decided by blackmail. It’s not only unethical, it is the opposite of scholarship.
Quite possibly, but I guess the reply would be that "that's what a privileged white guy would say". What might appear to one person as blackmail might merely be "holding to account" to another. As I often like to say, our problem is that science ought to be done by a bunch of Spocks, but we are all Kirks.
If they didn't like being an author with you, they could've resolved the problem by leaving the paper. Shoehorning someone off like that is unethical and unscientific.
That might be a reply, but any such reply is confused about what authorship is. Authorship is not a prize handed out to the worthy, it is a statement about who made substantial contributions to the paper. I think it’s unserious and unethical to conflate the two.
To make myself clear: while I wouldn’t start a collaboration with a known mass murderer, if I had already completed a collaboration with them and only then learned of their crimes, I would certainly not demand their removal. Any such demand would be unethical. Ditto for any other evil.
Sorry you were cancelled.
The eternally offended hold the power and they enjoy a good grievance - whether they truly believe what they are defending, we will never know but they enjoy flexing their power. You just happened to be on the receiving end this time.
Perhaps we have to move to a methodology where research is presented anonymously, much like how musicians try out for orchestras! The trend of applying different standards and gauging reactions based on perceived levels of marginalization in society is not unique to higher academia. One would hope that evaluations are based on merit and scientific rigour, but that is not the case. Gosh, I'm old.
Merit? Scientific rigour?! Spoken like a true senior scholar punching down 🙄Arguing from identity and representation still reigns supreme in higher ed humanities. What’s more, journals and conferences in my discipline advocate citation justice: citing only scholars who possess oppressed identities.
Well since you've mentioned the Talmud, they indeed had many things to say on criticism and who should you learn from (translations are all crudely mine, sorry in advance):
"A blade can't be sharpened except by the edge of another"
Regarding the disagreements between Hillel and Shamai the Talmud says "both are the living words of God".
Another saying is ""I have learned from all my teachers, but from my peers more than my teachers, and from my students more than anyone".
Finally there is a story about one of the wise man whose friend had died and he is upset with every one he studies with after, since they all admire his wisdom instead of criticizing him like his friend used to.
Love the last story the most. The utmost sign of respect--being wiling to criticize constructively.
Hey, Michael. This is an important post. Appreciate your argument and am very familiar with the many shut-down-conversation strategies due to power dynamics. In response to systemic forms of discrimination like racism and sexism, it’s part of a suite of polarized and under-developed strategies to “level the playing field”. At the same time, there is considerable evidence from implicit bias and workplace research that minoritized groups DO tend to face harsher criticism, greater scrutiny, less advancement than their normative peers. As a practitioner and researcher in workplaces, I can verify these as very common patterns across sectors. Your early research informed my thinking on matters of bias yet it seems to be under-acknowledged in your essay. I’m curious how you account for this not just in your analysis but actual practice?
This is a fair pushback. But I think there are two issues: Should everyone's work face scrutiny? Yes, that's universalism. Are evaluators currently applying that scrutiny evenly across race, gender, and status? No. The "don't punch down" rule tries to fix the second problem by corrupting the first problem. Better to attack the bias directly: blinded review where feasible, structured rubrics instead of holistic judgments, and pushing evaluators to apply the same standards visibly across the board. That treats the cause rather than wrapping certain scholars in protective gauze, which hurts not just them but the pursuit of knowledge more generally.
I agree with those strategies. I’m adding this view as many essays that attempt to criticize the power-dynamic-leveling strategies—which I have done for some time—often fail to acknowledge the actual role of identity in decision-making. In doing so they alienate many progressives, many minority group members, falling into the “anti-DEI” bin. I encourage you to include identity in your analysis in order to reach a wider audience who need your work but may dismiss it as another smart, white guy promoting “diversity viewpoint” (another under-developed strategy that mirrors what it critiques).
Who are you calling white?! And let me get this right--in a post about universalism you think it's appropriate to critique me based on my (incorrect) identity? Oy. Your comment actually reinforces my point: My argument either stands on its merits or it doesn't, no need to bring up my identity
Very interesting to me, since the standard in philosophy is pretty pointed and aggressive questioning at talk Q&As. An endowed chair at Cambridge once handed me my ass after a talk I gave. After another, an especially ornery questioner actually apologized to me afterwards. I didn’t boo-hoo about these criticisms. Just went to the bar like an adult :-)
So glad to see so many people resonate with this surprisingly controversial idea. Hope they’re all in academia.
I agree a lot with this and while I'm relatively "junior" (have had two postdocs and no permanent job) I've still seen the gamut of this (i.e. what levels of criticism are accepted in seminars, peer review, and such) across three countries (southeast U.S., east Scotland, and southeast France). It's hard for me to imagine a systemic solution since social norms vary so much by geography and field. I suppose increased anonymity helps, as you and others suggest, but isn't feasible for everything (e.g. talks). All the examples you give strike me as very North American (i.e. great concern over race, use of social media, the term "punching down"), not sure if that's relevant or not. Then I suppose it is really difficult for most of us to separate our opinions of people and our opinions of their ideas so in practice criticizing people's ideas may almost always amount to criticizing them at some level. Not sure about that last bit, throwing out a loose idea.
Thanks for engaging, Nick. I agree with you that when our ideas are criticized, it feels like we personally are being criticized. This is why science (if not scholarship more generally) is so damn hard--it demands that we have a thick skin. Otherwise, the larger entereprise of knowledge generation cannot benefit from productive disagreement. Cheers!
I have observed the same deterioration of academic culture in STEM. Nearly every question following a talk starts with "Thank you for a great talk" -- even when talk is not great. Practically no one asks tough questions. When tough questions are asked, the discussion is curtailed. And yes, I noticed a tendency to treat junior researchers with kid gloves and to shower disproportionate praise on female and minority speakers. And those who stick to old-fashion style of academic discussion may find themselves in trouble. At one of my seminar visits, I met a physics professor who told me that he was called to the chair office and berated for ..... asking a female speaker too many questions. The chair--a DEI zealot--saw it as creating a hostile environment. Thank you for the great post -- ;).
This underlying argument that not "punching down" (giving critical feedback to people lower in status) leads to bad outcomes is made here, too:
Harber, K. D. (1998). Feedback to minorities: Evidence of a positive bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 622.
Everyone deserves good feedback.
What exactly is the definition of punching down you have in mind here? I ask this because there is a tension. One the one hand, you say that punching down is not immoral and you want to defend it but in the end you seem to suggest otherwise. If by punching down you mean refraining from raising criticisms in academic settings, that’s not punching down, that’s a misunderstanding of it. Punching down (the way I see it at least), is, for example, going on Twitter criticizing talks/work/research (sometimes neutrally, sometimes in a jerkish way) under the guise of philosophical criticism, particularly against someone who is junior, say, whose consequences for possible 'piling on' might be something that hurts them significantly. Twitter is not academia, one can raise criticisms in a personal email, or during the talk, or by publishing an article on a journal. Of course people talk outside of academia – but post-internet I think we got the sense that the boundaries of academic circles have expanded so it is appropriate to bring your criticisms to Twitter. That is what I have reservations about. I also have reservations about how this post starts, by the way. If I was that PhD student and I read this piece I would not feel good. Was it necessary to start this post in that way? I agree that we should be able to raise criticisms (in appropriate settings in the appropriate way) but when we post something on the internet (“the internet”, I sound like Steven Harper now) its ramifications can have unpredictable and magnified consequences so it’s a good idea to be very careful. Sometimes it may be too late to regret later.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Martina. Where I'd push back is on your venue point. If work is published or made public, the critique should be public too. That's how the record gets corrected. One of the lessons of the replication crisis was that quiet hallway concerns didn't do the work public scrutiny does. Bad findings stayed in the literature for decades because only a few people wanted to criticize publilcly. So I don't think social media sits outside the academic circle, for better and worse. Fair point on the opening though. I tried to keep the PhD example anonymous and brief because I didn't want to make it about any one person. Whether I succeeded is a different matter.
"Sunlight over shadows," yes!
I got into a discussion the other day with another cartoonist about why there are almost no cartoons skewering the left. The problem, we concluded, is that punching down is cringey. I had crested a few possible examples: medieval-style stocks in a college quad, a haloed Jesus handing out fentanyl in an alley, and my favourite, people lined up at a food bank, all with cell phones, one talking to a friend on her phone, captioned "It's true Janet, just giving it away!"
I hope you are right and universities and research science generally is sobering up.
Your conclusion is the same as the one reached by George Carlin many moons ago. In comedy and perhaps satire, that sort of humor doesn't land (at least according to him; Dave Chapelle and Andrew Dice Clay when he was a thing would disagree of course). I consider science--if not scholarship more generally--to be different. Our job is to generate knowledge, and we can't do that if we need to hold back on telling folks what we really think about their ideas because of some identity characteristic.
Kyle Bravo has a good cartoon about this today. https://substack.com/@kbravo/note/c-251468211
Maybe we're just not used to cartoons mocking the leftie-liberal crowd.
I think some of this is something that is pretty unique to online spaces, where people can engage in pile-ons very quickly. Imagine if the senior scholar had made a comment in person to the postdoc about selection bias in his sample. They could have had a conversation about it and it would have just ended without all the drama that occurred. Online conversation is just always heightened and can quickly spiral.
I take the points that you have raised here, and I am rather amused, and intrigued. You see, I agree, for the most part, with the main objection. However, I don't believe that it is the objection that takes centre stage here. I believe that your point misses something grand that has been one of the main criticisms from the marginalized communities i.e., science is not value-free and thus talks of universalism about it are equally oppressive, to put it briefly.
To be charitable, yes, this talk of punching whichever direction is misconstrued far too often to defend notions that would be otherwise indefensible and is contributing to exactly an infantilization of scholarship from the global south and other marginalized communities.
Frankly, I don't believe we need this kind of protection, our ideas stand on their own because we're just as capable of intellectual rigor as the next person, and the systems of knowing we're working from are equally foundational to the human condition. This is nothing new.
I believe you have made the error of centralizing universalism and science as though these are intellectual yardsticks, without at the same time allowing yourself to acknowledge that it is these concepts, before the keyboard activists (😅), that have been weaponized against marginalized communities. When people are talking about power, it is against exactly these concepts that have been treated as immutable that people are trying to punch (😅)
Great article. We have been living in the ‘unenlightened’ era for a while now. I’m heartened that you think some of it might be weaning. I will remain optimistic.
I regularly pick some papers to teach my audience what goes into research and how a paper could be improved. My experience has been quite the opposite. Given that I am still young and in grad school, I get told off by my seniors and teachers to NOT question papers of people more experienced than me because it could be seen as disrespectful.
For example, I read this paper from a senior department head where the numbers didn't make much sense. I made a post about it, and the next thing I know, I am getting a call from my former teachers to not question seniors.
I could have been wrong. Maybe I didn't understand the technique they were using correctly, but I never got any clarifications. Maybe honor-based cultures place honor above the scientific endeavour?
That said, I am grateful to the teachers who have criticized my work. It's helped me think better and produce better work. It has been harsh at times, but I would pick harsh criticism over mindless fawning.
Great article! Although it seems blindingly obvious to evaluate and engage with science this way, reminders are necessary.
I think this approach of cushioning criticism is an overcorrection for how academia has been excessively hierarchical and credentialist in the past: as you say, a noble aim. But no science is immune from fair criticism. If it is, it is no longer science. David Deutsch's thesis on how truth-seeking science must be a 'good explanation' and falsifiable to drive human progress, then utterly breaks down.