The description of a conference put on by the National Association of Scholars sounds perfectly above board. “Fixing Science: Practical Solutions for the Irreproducibility Crisis” was supposed to examine how the “improper use of statistics” has cast doubt on peer-reviewed research. Participants would “craft and propose initiatives” aimed at pushing back against a “culture biased toward producing positive results.”
And yet some of those who have been most active in the movement to make science more rigorous and transparent chose to stay away. Two speakers also quietly dropped out. Among the concerns was that the lineup of speakers was almost entirely male. Nearly every session was what’s become known as a “manel,” leading one Twitter wag to dub the event a “manference.”
Another, less-obvious worry was that the NAS’s interest in reproducibility may have been less about making science better and more about advancing an ideological agenda. Scan the program and you’ll see sessions led by self-described climate-change skeptics, a presentation by an epidemiologist known for playing down the health effects of smoking, and the author of a widely discredited study purporting to show that same-sex couples are lousy parents.
That was enough to make Leonid Teytelman turn down his invitation. He looked at the program and thought, “This is a climate-change-denial conference,” says Teytelman, a computational biologist. “If you subtract the odd cranks, there aren’t that many scholars.” By Teytelman’s count, seven of the 21 speakers could be considered climate-change skeptics.
If I opted out of every psychology conference that was riddled with political agendas I would almost never attend conferences.
Teytelman, the chief executive officer of protocols.io, a research-sharing platform, did more than decline. He also emailed several speakers to warn them that, in his view, the NAS was neither to be taken seriously nor to be trusted. “Their work is dangerous, and I urge you to reconsider taking part in their event,” he wrote. One of those speakers, Brian Earp, a researcher at the University of Oxford, replied in an email to Teytelman that while he cares “more about the quality of people’s ideas than their political leanings,” he would feel obliged to pull out if “there is something nefarious here.” Earp ended up withdrawing.
Ronald Wasserstein, slated to deliver the conference’s keynote address, says he still planned to attend, though what he’s learned has given him pause. For starters, it makes him “slightly nuts” that the conference appears to provide a forum for climate-change denialism. “There are certainly things that I didn’t know that would have made it harder for me to say yes if I had known,” says Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association.
That’s not the intention of the conference, according to Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. Instead, as he wrote in a column for The Wall Street Journal, the NAS has become the latest victim of a “cancel culture” in which anyone “with an attitude of moral superiority and a Twitter account can try to shut down an event where opinions he dislikes are likely to be spoken.”
As for the accusation that the conference is a climate-change-denialism gathering in disguise, Wood says that the association has no official position on the subject. “There are some climate skeptics in the roster of speakers,” he says. “There are also some who are supporters of the climate consensus, so called.” Wood has described himself as a climate-change “agnostic.”
The NAS has been accused of slipping climate-change skepticism into the conversation before. A 2018 report on reproducibility published by the NAS refers to “ideologically driven fields such as climate science.” The report also calls for a review of climate-change-related regulations put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency — an oddly specific recommendation for a report on reproducibility. (Indeed, questions were raised at the time about the NAS’s motives.)
That report was also distributed and promoted by the Heartland Institute, which has advocated aggressively for skepticism about climate change. In 2017, Heartland mailed thousands of copies of its book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming to public-school teachers around the country. The organization’s strategy for sowing doubt about climate change is similar to its previous strategy of sowing doubt about the link between lung cancer and smoking.
A number of speakers at the NAS’s conference have Heartland connections, and Wood himself is listed in the “Who We Are” section of Heartland’s website, though he says he has no link to the organization other than attending a few of its conferences. “The NAS receives no financial support or attention from the corporate world or anyone who has a stake in seeing the recision of regulations that impose economic difficulties,” he says. “Our complaints are intellectual.”
As for the remarkable paucity of women speaking at the conference, Wood says the NAS did invite “several women” to speak at the event, but they declined.
Not everyone changed their plans, though. “I would not attend if I had evidence that I was being ‘played’ for political aims,” says Daniele Fanelli, a fellow in quantitative methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science who studies research bias and misconduct. “But I have no such evidence.”
Lee Jussim also planned to be there. Jussim, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, doesn’t defend the NAS against charges that it has a hidden political agenda, and he calls putting on an almost all-male conference “bad.” But he argues in an essay for Medium that just because the conference has biases and faults doesn’t mean it should be avoided: “If I opted out of every psychology conference that was riddled with political agendas, or run by an organization with political agendas … I would almost never attend conferences.”
In a post titled “Should I Stay or Should I Go?,” Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford, argues that while it’s important to engage with those who have varying perspectives, this particular conference is “not about regular scientific debate.” Instead, she writes, it’s about “weaponising the reproducibility debate to bolster the message that everything in science is uncertain — which is very convenient for those who wish to promote fringe ideas.”
It’s worth noting that Bishop, who often writes about research integrity and is among the most prominent voices advocating for reform in science, was not invited to the conference.
