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),
Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group’s evaluation), and
Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent).
If you want to pick a role model for designing a group’s practical rules of engagement, you can’t do better than Merton. To start, he coined the phrase “role model,” along with “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “reference group,” “unintended consequences,” and “focus group.” He founded the science of sociology and was the first sociologist awarded the National Medal of Science.
Merton began his academic career in the 1930s, studying the history of institutional influences on the scientific community. To him, it was a story of many periods of scientific advancement spurred on by geopolitical influences, but also periods of struggle to maintain independence from those influences. His life spanned both world wars and the Cold War, in which he studied and witnessed nationalist movements in which people “arrayed their political selves in the garb of scientists,” explicitly evaluating scientific knowledge based on political and national affiliations.
In 1942, Merton wrote about the normative structure of science. He tinkered with the paper over the next thirty-one years, publishing the final version as part of a book in 1973. This twelve-page paper is an excellent manual for developing rules of engagement for any truthseeking group. I recognized its application to my poker group and professional and workplace groups I’ve encountered in speaking and consulting. Each element of CUDOS—communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism—can be broadly applied and adapted to push a group toward objectivity. When there is a drift toward confirmation and away from exploring accuracy, it’s likely the result of the failure to nurture one of Merton’s norms. Not surprisingly, Merton’s paper would make an excellent career guide for anyone seeking to be a profitable bettor, or a profitable decision-maker period.