CHAPTER 5
Dissent to Win
CUDOS to a magician
Meyer R. Schkolnick was born on the Fourth of July, 1910, in South Philadelphia. He performed magic at birthday parties as a teenager and considered a career as a performer. He adopted the performing name “Robert Merlin.” Then a friend convinced him that a teen magician naming himself after Merlin was too on the nose, so he performed as Robert Merton. When Robert K. Merton (to distinguish him from his son, economist and Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton) died in 2003, the New York Times called him “one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century.”
The founders of Heterodox Academy, in the BBS paper, specifically recognized Merton’s 1942 and 1973 papers, in which he established norms for the scientific community known by the acronym CUDOS: “An ideologically balanced science that routinely resorted to adversarial collaborations to resolve empirical disputes would bear a striking resemblance to Robert Merton’s ideal-type model of a self-correcting epistemic community, one organized around the norms of CUDOS.” Per the BBS paper, CUDOS stands for
Communism (data belong to the group),
Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from),