The Science Factory

In college, a friend of mine who studied philosophy used to joke that he wanted to work at the Philosophy Factory after he graduated. Maybe the idea is not as silly as it seems. I’m currently soliciting venture capital for a Science Factory. Consider some of the benefits.

In academia, social scientists are sort of like traveling salespeople. They are largely autonomous, each working on their own projects, sometimes with only passing notice of what their colleagues are up to.

At the Science Factory, everyone works as a team focused on one goal: the production of knowledge.

In academia, an individual scholar (or perhaps a small team) prosecutes a task from start to finish. She seizes an idea, secures the grant, designs the study, collects the data, conducts the analysis, writes the results, and presents everything to an audience. Oh, and she teaches.

At the Science Factory, we benefit from the division of labor. Up in the Ideas Department (which is on the top floor; it’s important) whole teams are dedicated to synthesizing vast literatures and noting inconsistencies — but that’s all. The most compelling ones, after some culling, are sent over to the Methodology Department, which generates a set of pluralistic approaches to get at each of them. Then over to the grant writing department, and so on. The people who do each of the tasks become very good at them, and they end up saving a lot of wasted transition time.

In academia, scholars arriving at different conclusions get attached to their ideas and defend them to the death. Progress becomes mired in deep personal animosities that endure for years and do the community as a whole little good.

At the Science Factory, when two or more of our scholars find it impossible to settle on something, we stick them in a room together and don’t let them out until they have jointly agreed on a test that, ex ante, will discriminate between their two perspectives. We then run these studies and let the chips fall where they may. Both scholars become authors on the ensuing report, with a hearty thanks and slap on the back for pushing the ball forward.

In academia, science is an art, and an ad hoc one at that. Nobody can quite say exactly where they get their ideas or what makes some and not others successful. Moreover, this intangible trait, more than breadth of individual knowledge or methodological know-how, is often what makes the difference between a successful career and a less successful one.

At the Science Factory, science is 10% art and 90% process. The set epistemological rationales for conducting a study is small and well-defined: an inconsistency between the predictions of existing theories, a new area in need of descriptive attention, a puzzling observation in need of explanation… and that might be it. We weight these by their normative importance* and feasibility, and the agenda thus becomes deterministic. Where academia is ad hoc, we are routinized.

In academia, individuals market themselves. Sometimes they market the quality of their product — the thought and rigor that went into producing it. Unfortunately, because some of the products’ buyers know what they want to hear, the conclusions and implications of research can also become pertinent criteria.

At the Science Factory, we market our brand, and we want our brand to stand for good, systematic research, not for advancing a pre-formed agenda. (Admittedly, such places exist.) Choosing our projects in a systematic way makes us relatively agnostic to outcomes. The failing of one employee would hurt us all, which is why we work to instill a healthy ethos throughout the operation. Truth is our passion, and transparency our mantra.

A pipe dream? A solution to problems that don’t exist (or that only exist in the social, as opposed to the hard sciences)? Something we already see in the form of think tanks? Think about it. And while you think about it, polish the ol’ CV, because we’ll be accepting applications soon.

*We often outsource this task to the Philosophy Factory across the street.