Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Science is a creative endeavor that requires the free and open exchange of ideas to thrive. Society has benefited immensely from scientific progress, and in order for science to continue to better the lives of individuals and nations scientific work must be evaluated on the basis of scientific merit alone. Over the past decade, however, scientific departments and organizations have become increasingly politicized, to the point that the development of science is now being significantly impeded. This time the assault originated from the radical left, but conservatives have done their share of meddling in science and are likely to meddle again in the future. Keeping politics out of science is something that all people of good will, both Democrats and Republicans, should be able to agree on. Or so, once upon a time, one would have thought. How can we ensure political neutrality in science? I want to propose three critical principles for the protection of science from politics, and to illustrate them with three playful, slightly naughty fables about what has been happening when they are violated. The three principles are: (1) all scientists need to be able to say and argue whatever they want, even if it offends someone else; (2) universities and academic societies need to maintain strict neutrality on all social and political issues; and (3) hiring needs to be done on the basis of scientific merit alone. These principles have been lucidly outlined in three important documents at the University of Chicago, where I teach geophysical science: the Chicago Principles on Free Expression, which were issued by the university in 2014, and the Kalven Report “on the university’s role in social and political action,” from 1967, and the Shils Report on the “criteria for academic appointments,” from 1970. All these reports assume, as the Kalven Report puts it, that “the mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” This sounds prosaic, but the definition is important to emphasize because some people are now challenging it. They argue that faculty members should be activists who promote certain political positions and agendas, rather than pursue truth wherever it may lead. I should add that we are not perfect at the University of Chicago, and I sometimes fear that we honor these principles more in the breach than in the observance. And yet these principles are important goals for every scientific institution to at least aim for. I started my own journey in this fraught environment simply by self-censoring — for no less than five years. I stayed away from campus whenever possible and avoided departmental gatherings. At first I thought that the problem was a few bad apples in my department yelling at everyone who disagreed with them and accusing people of being various types of witches. I slowly learned that I was observing just a small part of a national movement in favor of censorship and the suppression of alternative viewpoints. It is absolutely essential that we resist this movement and encourage students and faculty to speak freely about whatever they want on campus: we all lose when people self-censor. Unfortunately, students and faculty are now self-censoring at alarming rates, in part as a result of the high-profile cancellations of academics who have been found guilty of wrongthink. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has documented 471 attempts to get professors fired or punished for their speech over the past six years, the vast majority of which resulted in an official sanction. In a recent report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Eric Kauffman estimates that 3 in 10,000 faculty members experience such an attack each year, which corresponds to about one every three years at a large university with a faculty of a thousand. Since these cancellations are so public and potentially harmful to the victim’s career, a small number can have an outsized impact on free expression. According to the same report, 70% of centrist and conservative faculty in American universities report a climate hostile to their beliefs and 91% of Trump-voting faculty say that a Trump voter would not express his or her views on campus or are unsure. Similarly, after a major academic freedom incident in the fall of 2021, MIT polled faculty at two faculty forums and found that approximately 80% are “worried given the current atmosphere in society that your voice or your colleagues’ voices are increasingly in jeopardy” and more than 50% “feel on an everyday basis that your voice, or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT.” The problem extends to students, too: more than 80% of them self-censor on campus, according to a FIRE survey last year. To get a sense of the magnitude of the self-censorship problem at universities, contrast these numbers with the fact that, according to a recent paper in Social Science Research Network by James Gibson and Joseph Sutherland, only 13% of American respondents did not feel free to speak their mind in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. The discovery and transmission of knowledge is severely hindered under these conditions. Another factor encouraging self-censorship among students and faculty is a growing administrative apparatus that often has goals other than the pursuit of truth. One mechanism is the imposition of language games, which can seem silly but have the effect of establishing an orthodox way of viewing the world, discouraging dissent, and stifling creativity. This pernicious practice can extend to faculty’s syllabi and even teaching. I was asked by an administrator not to use the term “blackbody radiation” in my class on global warming. Apparently “blackbody” — or more accurately, “black body” — is now exclusively a Critical Social Justice term. I refused. “Blackbody” is the scientific name for a hypothetical object that perfectly absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation. “Blackbody radiation” is the correct physics term for what I was teaching, and there is no way that I will stop using it. Luckily for me, just standing up was all that