There’s a lot of broken science, according to former CrossFit founder and Broken Science Initiative founder Greg Glassman. On April 11 Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom hosted a two-speaker event in collaboration with the initiative.

In 2022, Emily Kaplan and Glassman founded The Broken Science Initiative. According to the initiative’s website, it seeks to “call attention to the current state of modern science” which they describe as “broken,” “void of validation,” and has a “deductivist approach” which “stimulates results that cannot be replicated.”

Glassman founded and owned CrossFit, Inc. — a branded fitness regimen that involves high intensity movement — until 2020. The company is affiliated with about 13,000 gyms in 158 countries, and its worth has been estimated to be about $4 billion, according to an article from BBC News in June 2020. Glassman stepped down and sold Crossfit after he received backlash for various tweets and comments about the 2020 murder of George Floyd. 

Glassman began his speech saying the core values of science have shifted.

“I don’t think science is broken, but I think there’s a lot of broken science,” Glassman said. “Typically when you see that, you can find some kind of regulatory capture and a government agency — people are no longer in the business of providing remedies but of persuading the gatekeepers.”

After detailing some of the challenges he faced with media and regulatory bodies while running CrossFit, Glassman said faulty definitions are the fundamental issues with “modern science.” He gave his own definitions of terms like hypothesis and law, while mapping out four factors of how science is supposed to work. These factors, all of which he also described, are observation, measurement, prediction, and validation. Glassman also said probability is a crucial idea that has been debated since the Tower of Babel.

“You might look at a penny and say, is the 50/50 of the coin toss or the one in six of a dice, is that baked into the object?” Glassman said. “Or is that a reflection of our minds? We know it’s not an easy thing to learn, but we do know that probability is an objective measure of your level of knowledge.”

The Broken Science Initiative collaborator William M. Briggs spoke after Glassman. Briggs was a former professor at Cornell Medical School, a statistician at DoubleClick—an internet advertising company, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, and an electronic cryptologist with the U.S. Air Force. 

Briggs agreed with Glassman’s critique of science having similar problems, referring to his point about replication as a “replication crisis.”

“Doing science is easy,” Briggs said. “Creating models is easy. Positing theories is easy. It’s really easy to do this, and that’s part of our problem right there. We’ve gotten so good at this that we’re doing too much of it.”

Citing “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time,” an article published by Nature this January, Briggs discussed “disruptive science” and how revenue in every field from physics to psychology had plummeted since 1960.

“So it’s impossible to look across the science that we’re seeing out there and think that all of it or even most of it is any good or of any real use,” Briggs said. “There’s a tremendous problem out there. And there’s no symmetry. Even if half of science is right and half the science is wrong, the half that’s wrong takes much more energy and effort to combat the battle, especially because science is now run by the bureaucracy.” 

Briggs also quoted Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet.

“The case against science is straightforward. Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half may be simply untrue. Afflicted by small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn toward darkness.”

The invite-only occasion garnered the attention of many professors in Hillsdale’s STEM departments including Dean of Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry Matthew Young, who received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Northwestern University in 2007.

“I was disappointed that the speakers did not focus more on constructive ideas for how to improve science,” Young said. “Science has been incredibly successful at understanding the natural world and providing the basis for a wide variety of life-improving technologies, so the claim that science is broken carries a high burden of proof. I was not convinced, but the more interesting question to me is what are the specific ideas for improving the way that science works?”

Some students attended the event, including senior biology major Sydney Slepian, who expressed frustration with the speakers. 

“The main theme I got from the talk was to encourage skepticism of science in an audience that was already skeptical,” Slepian said. “They spoke about the flaw of confirmation bias in research, yet here they were doing the exact same thing in only searching for and explaining studies that show some inaccuracies in science and experiments rather than exploring the benefits and great strides seen in scientific research.”

Junior Victoria Kelly expressed similar sentiments.

“After everything we’ve seen especially over the last few years with COVID, I think there is a discussion that should be had and I’m interested in seeing what, if anything, the initiative grows into,” Kelly said. “That said, I don’t necessarily think last night was helpful. I walked away confused about why I should think the speaker was an expert on the topic of science, and I don’t think his message could convince anyone who didn’t already agree with him.”