I’ve been thinking a lot about how we could have a non-hierarchical science, and one idea has crystallised.

The way science is done now, senior scientists have a lot of decision making power: which papers get published, which grants get funded, who gets hired. This introduces a hierarchy and concentration of power that has both social problems (bias, well documented potential for abuse of trainees), as well as scientific ones (ideas that challenge old ways of thinking have a much harder time than they should).

However, I wouldn’t want to entirely eliminate the collective expertise of senior scientists. It’s always amazed me just how well some of them can cut through nonsense and see to the heart of an issue. I distinctly remember enthusiastically going to one of my postdoctoral advisors to talk about my latest complicated modelling idea and getting the response “yeah you could do that but what would it tell us about X?” and realising that they were completely right. I avoided months of fruitless work thanks to that one ten minute conversation.

But do they need to have decision making power to do that? I don’t think so. We should give decision making power to junior scientists: they should decide what ideas they work on, how to carry out their research, where to do it, who to collaborate with, and what to publish. The additional role of senior scientists is to give the junior scientists advice, which those junior scientists are entirely free to ignore. You don’t need to force people to listen to advice. If the advice is good, freely given and not binding, people will seek it out. And there’s no reason it has to only be senior scientists who are in this advice giving role, and no reason that as a senior scientist you need to be in this role if you don’t want to be.

This inverts the power dynamics in a really progressive way. With this approach, there’s no way to impose your idea of how science should be done on anyone, instead you have to persuade them. This is exactly how it should be. By placing arbitrary authority at the heart of science we’ve made it unnecessary for established ideas to argue for their value, because the holders of those ideas can just deny publication, grants and jobs to those who disagree. Why bother arguing when you can do that?

An obvious follow-up question is: OK, but then how do you allocate funding? It’s a good question and one I’m happy to discuss ideas about. But it’s not a case of us having a good answer already and needing a strong argument for an even better way. The current system is a hierarchy whose very nature is contrary to the basic values of science. I suspect almost any alternative would be better. Personally, without a clear winner in mind, I suspect the best approach would be heterogeneous: let’s try out different ideas and see what works instead of all the countries in the world converging more or less on variations of this same basic formula.