The Cold War divided Science

Distance From Harvard and lesswrong discussion of it seems relevant to this.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.

I am not able to access my resources at the moment, but if I recall from school, a particular politically powerful Russian scientist essentially mandated that the abiogenic petroleum theory would be the one accepted by the Russian establishment. At the time, they justified this by pointing to large oil fields for which source rocks (underlying rock containing thermally decomposed organic matter) had not been discovered. Of course since then the source rocks have been discovered.

Amusingly, if you Google "abiogenic petroleum theory" you will find lovely quack articles explaining how plausible the theory is and how it means we will never run out of oil.

The main difference was that the Warsaw Pact had a single mandated epistemology: the dialectical materialism of marxist and leninist philosophy. I'm told this is fairly workable as a framework for science, but it also represents a fundamental restriction.

Still, I can't think of any substantial disagreements in physical science except for the ones you mentioned. There were many in softer fields, such as economics, prehistory and anthropology.

I know a few people who did medicine, IT, philosophy and history of religions in the Warsaw Pact. (No biology or geology, sorry.) All describe there was infrequent but regular communication going on with the scientists in Imperialist countries. It was tightly controlled, i.e. only a few selected and carefully briefed scientists would be allowed to visit conferences abroad. But that doesn't seem to have been about heretical knowledge, but about the loyalties of the scientists. Many would defect given the chance, and the Warsaw Pact countries tried hard to prevent that. (For example, your chance of attending a conference outside the Iron Curtain would much depend on whether you had close family staying at home that you wouldn't want to abandon.) A few more would have access to the locked bookshelf with the foreign journals and books by persona non grata authors like Nietzsche, but those journals and books did get read.

This was important in cases such as the rise of the HIV threat. The Warsaw Pact heard about it long before it had any cases of its own, because there was little tourism, even less organized crime (due to the worthlessness of their currencies) and a tradition of central registration of STDs that would have been called draconian in the West at that time. When HIV did trickle into the Warsaw Pact, its health system was prepared.

I can think of one case where the relative isolation was an advantage. In the fifities, West German pharmacologists offered East German ones to try Thalidomide, a sedative used, among other things, for morning sickness in pregnant women. The East Germans looked at it and refused, saying they thought it dangerous for foetal development. So the thousands of cases of phocomelia that followed were all in Western Germany.

I noticed people don't seem to use tags as much anymore, but tagging this "science" or something would be nice.

At least one side is thoroughly wrong

It's not a priori impossible that some different fuels were created using different processes, especially when we have three distinct types - oil, coal and natural gas.

This isn't a politically charged topic like sociology, or even biology, but a physical science where people are supposed to agree on the answers.

A politically charged scientific topic is in many (most?) cases political not because of its implications, but because different political parties are known to endorse different views.

The USA and the USSR both made spacecraft during the cold war. Air and space travel were not based on distinct physics in each nation. But the spacecraft looked quite different. The USA had cones and the USSR had scheres. My amateur conclusion is there was some measure of aesthetics and patriotism trumping physics in that visual difference.

More questions along a similar line:

• Are there any other currently/recently-existing scientific communities?

• Is there anything the Soviets got right that we don't know about yet? There was a SSC comment thread a while back about the Soviet belief in magnetic storms influencing behavior, which is something the Americans are apparently only now looking into.

• Viliam_Bur says: "In Soviet Union many scientists knew that e.g. Lysenkoism was a fraud, they were just afraid to speak openly, because they would be fired or put in prison." What beliefs in America/the West are like Lysenkoism? What can be done about them?

• How accepted was Lysenkoism among the general public? scientists outside the relevant field? the political elite?

• There are many other examples of beliefs like the Soviet one in abiogenic oil: Germans and low blood pressure, Japanese and blood types, Koreans and fan death, 19th-century Americans and the belief that masturbation causes insanity, Anglophones (or at least Americans and Brits) and the belief that eating carrots improves eyesight. What beliefs in [parts of] America/the West fall into that category? What, if any, are their significant consequences? (Abiogenic oil means depletion isn't a problem; fan death means... people buy fewer fans, and don't leave them on at night.)

This raises some disturbing implications. Namely, that it's possible for a scientific community to converge on something besides the truth.

This raises the question: in cases of disagreement which theory was correct? I get the impression that in most cases of disagreement, the current consensus is that the West was correct, but is that because the West was actually correct or simply because the West won the cold war?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union

Mendel- and Darwin-based biology was rejected in the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. Unlike Western epistemology, which holds itself to a standard of objectivity, communism (and leftism in general) is always suspicious that someone who tries to convince you of an idea is secretly planning to sell you something. In this field communism made the same mistake of the postmodernists: it couldn't conceive of objective science without an agenda hidden somewhere. Genetics was labeled "bourgeois science" and thus not worth learning. A classic example of rejecting a good idea because of who happened to say it.

I feel like this might more accurately be titled "The Soviet Union Had Some Problems With Its Scientific Establishment."

If I understand correctly, Soviet biology was in shambles because of Lysenko.

I am completely uninformed on the technical particulars here, so this is idle speculation. But it isn't totally implausible that ideological factors were at play here. By this I don't mean that there were arguments being deployed as soldiers - nothing political, as far as I'm aware, rides upon the two theories - but that worldviews may have primed scientists (acting in entirely good faith) to think of, and see as more reasonable, certain hypotheses. Dialectical materialism, for instance, tends to emphasize (or, by default, think in terms of) qualitative transformations that arise from historically specific tensions between different forces that eventually gets resolved (in said qualitative transformations.) If I understand you correctly that the difference between the two theories was that the American one isolated a process (1) explicable by the properties of a single substance and (2) acting at all times in Earth's history, while the Soviet one isolated a process (1) explicable in terms of the interaction of forces and (2) only active until it the conditions for it (stores of primordial methane) were resolved, then it's easy to construct a just-so story about how a scientist thinking in the categories privileged by diamat might find the second more intuitive than the first. Likewise, if, as a stereotypical reductive mechanist, you tend to think of individual objects rather than relationships, and eternal laws rather than historically specific ones, the former might be more intuitive than the latter. Further, it seems at least facially plausible that if you had a scientific community with Aristotelian or German idealist frameworks, you'd have different dominant theories still - even with researchers acting in good faith, with lots of data, and material incentives to produce a theory that derived correct predictions. (Such frameworks bear some similarities to, but are more vague and general than, Kuhnian paradigms.)

Of course, I could totally misunderstand the nature of the two theories at play, and I don't know anything about the geological communities of the two superpowers specifically, so the just-so stories here are probably complete bullshit. But your concerns are more general than the specific examples as well, so consider their purpose to be illustrative rather than explanatory.

There is a simple and good reason for that. Soviet scientist Nikolai Kudryavtsev, proponent of abiogenic theory, discovered that oil and gas that Russia is exporting now. So his theory was assumed true. It has nothing to do with ideology.